


New Flesh

by Zombieheroine



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blind Character, Blind Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison, Cyberpunk, Cyborgs, Dubcon Cuddling, Dysfunctional Relationships, Human Experimentation, Love/Hate, M/M, Medical Horror, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Pining, Possessive Behavior, Power Dynamics, Psychological, body image issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-05 05:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12788175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zombieheroine/pseuds/Zombieheroine
Summary: "The notion that nature can be calculated inevitably leads to the conclusion that humans too can be reduced to basic mechanical parts."- GrendelReaper is a valuable asset to Talon, so valuable in fact that he is given benefits. Benefits, who is still a work in progress.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I got super inspired by[ the art Marshyoftheblobs](http://marshyoftheblobs.tumblr.com/post/167900616036/my-contribution-to-the-reaper76bigbang-reverse) made for the Reaper76 Reverse Bang, and so this fic was born. 
> 
> I love science fiction, and cyborgs are very close to my heart. I also love medical horror and gross stuff that happens to people's bodies, so here we go.
> 
> As always, thanks to my beta-reader Zinteyro who outdid himself this time by beta-reading this in less than a day. Thanks man, you help me improve!

Sombra had been remarkably annoying for a while now. Gabriel was trying to work, collecting data and attempting to put together his next mission from various small pieces he had managed to gather together, but unfortunately he wasn’t allowed to do so in peace because Sombra insisted on hanging around him and toying with her own tech. She had an annoying habit to rock on chairs and browse the web without headphones on, and so every now and then a random video feed started blaring its audio, interrupting Gabriel’s train of thought. 

And yet he refused to recognize it, he wouldn’t give the woman-child the pleasure of showing his growing irritation even though she was probably very much aware of the effect she had on him – why else would she do it? At least she didn’t mess with his systems. He supposed she wasn’t as stupid as she seemed since she was aware of limits such as his careful mission planning, but then again no crossed boundaries made it all so _petty_. She was obviously having the time of her life while surfing and baiting and hacking and God knew whatever the hell else, and if Gabriel would say anything at all he would be the one losing. 

He hated this. 

It was all the more annoying knowing she could have been anywhere else in the world, but if he wanted to do his job properly Gabriel had no other choice but to be here. Bases as large and well-equipped as this one didn't exist everywhere after all, and with all the scientific and weapons technology around the computers were also better than the modest laptops Gabriel usually carried with him on missions and unrelated side-jobs. He also had to admit that the large and well-guarded base was a more comfortable place to sleep in than any motel, safe-house or transport. He felt safe here and slept well, secure with the knowledge that the facade of a regular research center held and others took care of watching the premises.

This particular Talon base was located in a remote industrial area, inside a large research complex that facaded as Axiom Corporation's property. The whole area was fenced and under video surveillance, all standard procedures for any business' research laboratories. This one was even cleared to develop weapons and handle restricted materials, and even if some legal authority became suspicious of it and wanted to search the premises they'd have to get through Axiom's army of lawyers first. 

So far everyone's eyes had been turned in other directions; according to Gabriel's research Morrison and Amari had been giving grief mostly to Lumerico, and Vishkar's reputation was down in the mud as well, but Axiom was safe with its modest presence and few establishments. 

On the down side, the intelligence technology was something of a catnip for a bothersome stray called Sombra who took every opportunity to get her paws on Axiom's computer systems, which led to her being here bothering Gabriel.

Gabriel was trying to analyze a seventy-two-hour long surveillance footage, but his concentration was periodically broken by a cackling giggle from behind him whenever Sombra found something curious. He clenched his jaw, closed his eyes, took a deep breath and forced himself to not say anything, just get back to his work. 

Some more tapping with the stupid jingling sound-effects from Sombra’s custom screens followed, and then another giggle. Sombra was shifting on her seat and reacting to various things by laughing, huffing and clicking her tongue, clearly itching to start commentating out loud. 

It was raking on Gabriel's nerves, and finally when Sombra burst into devious giggles his patience snapped.

“What?” he asked through gritting teeth. He didn't need to turn around to look to know she had spun around on her chair and turned her back to her screens.

“Oh, nothing special, Gabe,” she said, her smirk evident in her tone. “It's just that there's so much interesting stuff everywhere, and Axiom's inner network is practically _bursting_ with secrets!”

This made Gabriel pause the footage on his screen and turn his head to glance over his shoulder. “Don't tell me you're snooping around places that are none of your business.”

Sombra smirked wider and crossed her ankles, lounging in an obnoxiously relaxed pose in the plain office chair. “I make it my business. It _is_ my business since I work here too,” she quipped. 

Gabriel rolled his eyes and clicked his tongue while focusing on the wide screens behind the smirking woman. It looked like she was going through large files of data on the main-screen, and on the side one she had opened up some thing's source code. 

“One of these days, when you interrupt my work flow one time too many, I will report you,” Gabriel murmured just loud enough for Sombra to hear.

He got only laughter in return. “That would be useless. I leave no trace, like I was never even there.”

“Right,” Gabriel huffed and tried to go back to work. 

Sombra let him do so for a while, but he sensed she hadn’t returned to her screen. He could feel her eyes at the back of his neck and already guessed this was not over yet. He heard the little jingling sound her hard-light projections made when she flipped a screen or a file in her fingers, and like a true hacker, she couldn't hold her tongue for long. 

“You know, I bet I have some stuff you too would like to look into,” she said. 

Gabriel huffed dismissively. “I highly doubt it.”

“No no, really! I bet there are a ton of things you'd like to know about your own employers – I know there have always been interesting things for me,” Sombra continued, her tone acquiring a teasing edge. 

“Again, I doubt that. Talon's finer points don't interest me, nor do the details of their many projects. Take my word, there's very little of anything left that could interest or shock someone who's done things that I have,” Gabriel said, only half paying attention to the conversation anyway. He wanted to work and get the fresh info out to the cells that could use it, and then he could focus on his private projects. 

But Sombra was not shaken either, on the contrary: she laughed again and in the midst of it rambled in Spanish something Gabriel didn’t quite catch. “I bet I could amuse you though!” 

Gabriel threw her a withering look over his shoulder, and while at it spotted the neon pink little holo-file Sombra was toying with. “I don't have time for your games,” he said. 

Sombra chuckled. “Who said these are _my_ games? Life is full of games, Gabe. And like it or not, we're the players.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes to himself and refused the urge to scoff. He just wanted to work, why was that so much to ask? He had a job to do and it had a deadline to be considered, why did the young ones always insist on this useless chatter? Sombra was an extraordinary woman with her skills, unmatched even. Gabriel handed her that even though he would have rather died than admitted it out loud, but she also had an appetite for ideologies. Passingly Gabriel wondered how many global crises it would take to rid the youth of their persistence to dream and believe in things. 

“Careful with that tone, Sombra,” he said aloud. “One day you'll be too wrapped up in your ego and get burned.”

“Aw, don't worry about me, papi, I'm a big girl,” Sombra cooed and cackled on top of it. “Maybe you're the one who should ask more questions.”

“I know you're a menace, that's all I need,” Gabriel said.

Sombra groaned, obviously bored and disappointed at his dry replies, and Gabriel wished she would soon grow tired enough to leave him alone. She really was an annoying stray, whining for attention and for someone to play with her, and with the whole world available for her through the net Gabriel couldn't figure out why she insisted on bothering him. 

To his disappointment Sombra didn't lose faith. She sighed loudly and was quiet for a moment, but when she spoke again her tone had shifted back to the teasing one, now with a mischievous edge. “You know... I bet I do have something that will interest you.”

This time Gabriel didn't bother to stop the scoff. “We just went over this.”

Sombra acted as if she hadn't heard anything: “Anyone with serious interests in the world could always use a good hacker, and you, my friend, happen to have the very best one right here!”

“Funny how that doesn't get my work done any sooner,” Gabriel said. “Actually, now that I think about it, it seems to be having the opposite effect.” 

“And what if I told you I could locate your nemesis for you?” Sombra suggested, barely keeping the giggle out of her voice. 

Gabriel glared at her over his shoulder and hoped his face was at a suitable state of decay today to make the heaviest possible point. Sombra knew very well at this point that mentioning Morrison in any way to him was strictly out of bounds, and even though she had probably spied on his _private_ investigation file on Soldier 76 and had a good laugh about it, she had followed this unspoken rule until now. 

Sombra held his glare, and now that he had turned to her he saw her lopsided smile along with that knowing stare he didn't like one bit. Then his eyes focused on the pink holoimage that Sombra was still flicking in her fingers like a magician would a coin, and suddenly Gabriel was overcome with a need to know what was in it. 

Sombra wiggled her brows. “Ah, you got it, finally,” she said with a smirk. 

Gabriel looked her in the eyes again and gave her a sour frown. “Don't force me to kill you,” he growled. 

Sombra clicked her tongue and returned the sour look. “Oh come on, could you be game for like a second? I'm trying to bring you early Christmas!”

Gabriel gritted his teeth. “My _private_ relations are _none_ of your business. Keep your nose out of them,” he snarled. 

Sombra raised a brow at him and pursed her lips in an unimpressed face, huffing. “But this is too good! You'll like this, I promise! And the higher-ups would give you your present soon anyway, I'm just showing you the closet it’s hidden in!”

This gave Gabriel a pause. The statement was too strange and too specific to be random, and more importantly it didn't match his own latest info. He got a nasty feeling that Sombra actually had something more juicy than obscure security camera footage from a remote gas-station, or even an intercepted message-thread. 

His silence gave him away, and Sombra's smirk was back in full force. The damned brat knew she had the upper hand now, and that only deepened Gabriel's snarl. 

She tossed the holoimage like a coin and they both watched it spin in the air before falling back to her palm. 

“Your latest sighting of this Soldier 76 that you have a crush on is from three months ago, yes?” Sombra asked even though she already knew it was true. 

Gabriel begrudgingly nodded. 

“Well, I know where he's gone,” Sombra continued. The holoimage went into the air again. “He's clearly a pro and his reputation as a 'one man army' or, like we liked to call him back in Dorado, 'mad dog' is well-earned, but all it takes is one mistake, and when you're alone you're alone. That's why we smart people join gangs. If you make a mistake alone, you're screwed.”

Something in the pit of Gabriel's belly suddenly turned hard and cold, almost like an icy cramp. _He's dead_ was the very first thought, one he tried not to ever think, and a mix of disappointment and loss pressed on his shoulders. But then rationality caught up with the gut-feeling and offered a better option: three months was an unreasonably long time to store a body and conceal information like this, and after such a long time a simple “he's dead” would hardly make Sombra smirk like that. 

And alas, there was more. Sombra continued: “Talon sure has fingers in lots of pies, you know? And damn am I happy I like to raid our own databases and internal systems as much as I do, since gems like this are so rare and _so good_! I can honestly say it's a rare occasion I come across something this cool, amigo!” 

She was smirking again and clearly milking the occasion for everything, and Gabriel was growing impatient fast, the cold cramp still in his gut and this chase definitely making it worse. “Just spit it out, whatever it is,” he snapped. 

For a second Sombra looked surprised at his tone but recovered quickly, the knowing smile back in place. She flicked the file in her hold and finally opened it, a pink window appearing to hover above her palm. It was an ordinary report file, and with a quick glance Gabriel recognized the scientific language and the form of research notes, his gaze automatically focusing on the bolded title: “Cyborgization project: WIP” 

Sombra continued talking: “Talon has a thing for evolution, and in this particular branch the approach seems to be 'let's speed things up a little'.”

Gabriel felt oddly tense and numb. The file looked and sounded like nonsense, it was all advanced robotic engineering and biochemistry and even when he read it he didn't understand it. “And?” he urged the woman on.

“Well...” Sombra mused, “I just thought it was interesting that your last sighting is from three months back and that this particular project is three months old. Also, from what I could tell, this is a new file on top of over a hundred cyborgization projects Talon has done in Axiom laboratories, and yet it's still labeled number seventy-six.”

For a long moment Gabriel stared at Sombra, then turned to stare at the file over her palm. The dates checked out and it was indeed Axiom's form, but there were no names mentioned, even if the serial number of the project was almost too obvious, clearly a joke among the research team. 

Only one word left Gabriel's mouth: “Where?”

Sombra smirked. “That's the best part,” she said, drawing her words out. “Right here.”

Gabriel stared. Sombra's smile widened, and she pointed at the floor with her index finger. 

For a moment Gabriel just continued to stare, his mind working furiously while still in disbelief, refusing to put together the obvious answer. The idea of Morrison being right here felt impossible, and Gabriel tried to reject it; Sombra had to be joking, pulling some incredibly tasteless prank on him just to see how he'd react, or maybe she had just gotten things wrong and the project didn't have anything at all to do with Morrison, maybe this was just a plan or a stupid coincidence, some weird inside joke within the medical engineering branch. But whatever it was, the obvious just couldn't be true. Morrison couldn't be here. 

And yet, already fastening his mask, Gabriel said: “Show me where.” 

Sombra grinned triumphantly and sprang up from her chair, dashing towards the door, and Gabriel strode after her so fast he slipped half into wraith form. 

The large building complex was a strange mixture of mundane and military. It had the aesthetic of an ordinary research facility with its office floors, break rooms and hallways with plastic potted plants, the laboratories and test chambers and engineering halls, but there was very little furniture, many offices were vacant and all the tech around was clearly military grade. There were always crates full of smuggled, stolen or black-market goods going from laboratory to transports or vice versa, and most noticeably the personnel of Talon's militant branches wore their masks. The scientists and engineers did not and they looked shockingly normal, perfectly fitting in the office environment, but the security staff and the soldiers training there were a stark reminder of the nature of their work. 

It all fitted Gabriel more than well, he rather liked his new identity and he definitely didn't want the entire organization to know he used to fight them, and Sombra seemed to enjoy her anonymity to its fullest as well, only she didn't have to wear a mask to do so. She skipped through the corridors and stair-cases in her bright purple glittering shirt and loose college trousers like she was at a slumber party and not in a secret terrorist base, and Gabriel followed her in the skull-mask but without his long leather coat or armor, only wearing the simple black shirt he had under the gear over Reaper's trousers and the heavy boots. It was strange to feel out of place in an environment that was so unusual to begin with.

They went down, all the way to the ground level and even lower after that, first taking a flight of stairs to the cellar level where they had to go through a heavy reinforced door asking for a special clearance pass that Sombra took care of with a tap of a finger, and then through what looked like an old maintenance corridor to an elevator lobby. There were three elevators, doors shining clean and new, and Sombra summoned one with a push of a button, and almost immediately one pair of doors slid open. 

The elevator didn't go further up from the first underground level, but it did go several ones down. The button sledge had five buttons, and each was accompanied with a plastic shield with black letters stating what the level was for. Below those was another clearance pass reader. 

Gabriel read the shields quickly. He had known these levels existed, but in the blueprints they were just labeled “laboratories”. These shields named each level according to their research field and a name of someone, possibly the head of each department. 

Sombra pushed the button for the level minus-three which read: “Biochemistry and robotics, E. S. Slovinska”. Then after a sweep of her finger, the elevator took them down. 

The descent took almost two minutes, but finally the ring of an announcement told they had arrived in their destination and the doors opened. There was a short corridor, then double doors, and finally they arrived at the laboratory itself. 

They stepped into a large open space resembling something between a hospital ward and a garage. There were various work-stations, heavy computer modules and operating tables in a loose circle formation around large tanks in the middle of the room. There were piles of tools on trolleys, in boxes around the room and lining the walls; blowtorches, wrenches, screwdrivers, drills, containers full of wires, cords, bolts and screws. The tanks in the middle were two tall, round glass things illuminated from within and filled with liquid. 

On the tables there were pieces of machines, little engines and circuit boards all around, but some resembled more finished products with several systems hooked together and metal shells built around them. On the shelves on the walls as well as from the hooks in the ceiling hung a large variety of half-finished mechanical human parts. The light of the tanks shone through the various metal skeletons, fine parts of hands, arms, legs and torsos, outlining their unmistakable limb shapes as well as the gaps and knobs of the mechanical structures betraying their uncanny true nature. 

But Gabriel didn’t care for any of those, he had spotted something more interesting. There was a shape floating about in one of the tanks. He approached the tank, slowly walking past all the computers and tables full of robotic human parts, before stopping right in front if, staring at the bundle hooked into a dozen tubes and wires, floating in the liquid. 

“J- Jack?” he gasped, numb and his eyes wide. “What on Earth have they done to you?!”

It was Jack, Gabriel knew without any additional information needed, he recognized the face, and the face was everything there was left to recognize. He floated inside the tank like a driftwood, completely submerged and clearly unconscious, lightly swaying with the invisible currents. He was hooked into various tubes and cords, almost every one of them somehow inside his body, some through needles or through actual ports sunken into his flesh. The flesh of which so little remained; there were no arms, no legs, only scarred stumps with tubes and cords sunken into them making it look like his limbs had unraveled like a rag doll's.

There was a plastic tube pushed into his gut through a hole and a plastic mouthpiece, and when Gabriel looked closer he saw other plastic tubes like that in each of his stumps, and they all connected to the same port in the bottom of the tank. The black and red lines and cord chunks looked heavier and clearly had something inside of them, and they connected to a different set of ports in the top of the tank. 

Without thinking Gabriel lifted his hands to the glass and leaned closer until his nose almost touched the surface as if he could see something more or better like that. Or maybe he was afraid that the mutilated being inside the tank wasn’t real and would vanish like a mirage at any moment. Maybe he was as afraid that it was Jack as he was that it wasn’t. 

The only thing he saw better this close was the metal plates sunken into Jack’s chest, and the cruel joke, number 76, engraved into the left one. 

Sombra’s self-satisfied chuckle broke the silence. “Well. Is that impressive or what?”  
It took Gabriel a few disorienting seconds to figure out what she meant. He had forgotten she was there at all, and now suddenly recalled what had happened mere minutes ago before he had focused on the remains of a man inside a weird testing tank.

“Yeah, sure,” he muttered, throwing her a glance over his shoulder. “Impressive.” He didn’t know what else to call this, not even what he really wanted to call this. He didn’t know what he was feeling, if he was in shock and thus still waiting for the realization to hit and the actual reaction to come, or if the swirl of unknown emotions in his gut were the actual reaction. 

There was too much to take in at once. Meeting Jack like this would shake the earth below him even if he was just a regular prisoner, but meeting him in this condition piled on that and turned it into something else entirely. 

Gabriel leaned in until the tip of his nose actually touched the glass and focused on what remained of Jack’s limbs. Luckily the liquid inside the tank was rather clear, only slightly tinting to yellow and making him doubt it was simply water, and he could see Jack well. The diameter of the tank was only four or five feet, and Jack was very close. Without the glass there he would have been within an arm’s reach. 

There was barely anything Gabriel could tell from the state of Jack’s arms. From the looks of it they were completely gone, all the way to the shoulder and maybe even as far as his clavicle and major chest muscles. In their place there were metal plates and a new shoulder that shone fresh and smooth like new plastic, and Gabriel wondered if the red casing hid metal bones and fake joints. 

His thighs had been spared, but the legs seemed to have been cut above the knees. There was barely any scar tissue, the cuts looked clean and already well-healed even with the metal ports already fused into where his shins should have begun, but even though they looked definitely better than the mess that was the upper body they made Gabriel crave for an explanation. How had Jack ended up in this condition? Sombra has mentioned a mistake made, and Gabriel had quickly put two and two together and quickly came to a conclusion that Jack must have been wounded very severely for Talon to capture him in the first place, but the legs were clean. _Too_ clean. 

Had they taken a saw to his legs? Maybe it was just his other arm or something that had gotten hit, either destroyed in the fight or amputated later, and now that Gabriel looked he did see some scarring on the right side of Jack’s flank he didn’t recognize. Maybe he had gotten hit by a grenade or a spray of bullets, maybe there had been an explosion… Maybe Talon had cut off one limb and just kept going after that. 

“Agents!” called a surprised voice from the laboratory’s door suddenly, making Gabriel jump. “You shouldn’t be here!”

Gabriel turned around to look who had joined them, and sitting crossed-legged on one of the operating tables Sombra did the same. 

Just one person had entered the laboratory, one who wasn’t wearing a mask but a white coat and who even if surprised didn’t look particularly displeased to find guests. 

“Agent Sombra, I had a feeling this might interest you, but did you have to bring agent Reyes here as well?” the scientist sighed and started to make her way towards them. She was a plain, unremarkable woman maybe in her early forties with her brown hair up in a loose bun, and under her lab coat she was wearing a brown cardigan and practical straight trousers. From her get-up one could immediately see that the only thing of any import in her appearance was the lab coat. 

“Sorry,” Sombra quipped with a shrug and a smile. “I just couldn’t help myself!” 

The woman walked around the many tables and stepped over the heavy cords on the floor without looking and clicked her tongue at the younger woman. “Poor excuse, agent,” she noted but without any real scold. “But I completely understand. Of course cyborgization interests you, you have had some work done yourself, haven’t you? But you knew we didn’t plan to involve agent Reyes at this point of the project…” She turned her eyes to Gabriel now, looking mildly displeased and somewhat regretful, as if a plan for a little surprise in the office had been foiled. 

“I’m sorry, agent Reyes. I planned to tell you later when I would be a bit further in the project 76,” she said. 

Gabriel was still numb, but now he was also confused. He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb and stupidly asked: “What is this?” 

The scientist put her hands in the pockets of her lab coat and walked to him, joining him by the tank and gazed at the man inside. “Oh this? Just the next step in reinventing human.” She smiled and despite her best efforts to keep her tone casual came across bragging. 

Gabriel turned to face the tank again. “What?” he asked again. 

The woman smiled, almost smirked, and refused to answer. Instead she pushed her right hand towards Gabriel and said: “I am Doctor Slovinska. I have a PhD in bio-chemistry and a Masters degree in robotics. Pleased to meet you.” 

Automatically Gabriel responded to the gesture and reached out to shake the woman’s hand. “You know my name. I’m a mercenary,” he replied without thinking. 

Slovinska huffed a polite laugh, let go of his hand and put hers back to her pocket. “I build things for work, always have,” she said. “I used to develop prosthetics in several universities, and I designed and built omnics before the Crisis. You see, I like things complete, that’s why I would have liked you to come see the progress a bit later. This is still going through test-runs.” 

Gabriel was starting to feel genuinely dumb, and not due to the surprise or his momentarily shaken state. He felt like his thought was running well and fast, but Slovinska was not making much sense to him anyway. He stared at the side of her face expecting a continuation, then turned to look at Jack as if there was something more to see – there wasn’t – and then looked back at her. 

“I don’t understand,” he quietly admitted. 

She turned to him to give him an understanding smile before turning to sigh at her work. “Cyborgization is not as easy as people make it sound, you know. Sure, replacing an individual limb is simple enough, and small helpful devices such as pacemakers and fake kidneys are even easier, but larger systems… Those are hard. It takes work, tests, retries, persuading the very body you are trying to upgrade to accept the systems. I managed to build neural interfaces for this one in a month, but there are still several kinks I have to solve.” 

Gabriel put his hand against the glass and leaned his weight to it. Only now did he notice how warm the surface was. “What does that have to do with me?” 

Slovinska shrugged. “I would have liked you to see this when I was done putting it back together instead of when I have just taken it apart.”

Gabriel felt uneasy, with his confusion and something else. He glanced at Jack again. Still unconscious, still floating. “You misunderstand me. I’m asking what do I have to do with this entire thing. Why would you bring me in here in the first place?” 

Slovinska looked surprised again and for a moment she was at loss for words, her mouth open but no sound coming out. Quickly her surprise melted back into a pleased smile, this time with genuine warm joy. For some reason the expression on this woman looked like a warning sign. 

Slovinska turned to Sombra who was still sitting where she had settled to and watching them, silent for once. “Agent Sombra! I thought you’d spoil all of the surprise!”

Sombra shrugged and laughed. “I had to leave something for you too, amiga!” 

“How kind of you,” Slovinska said. 

Gabriel waited, his brows high and unease tightening its hold. 

Slovinska had that warm kindness still about her when she turned to Gabriel again and said: “Take this as a benefit that comes with the job.”

The unease turned cold again, and Gabriel didn’t know what to say. The warmth seeping from the tank made him feel sick. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, don’t worry, this has all been cleared months ago,” Slovinska assured him with a wave of her hand. “After some upgrades and tweaking you’ll get him. I create closed and reliable systems, I’m sure there won’t be any difficulties at all. After I’m finished, that is.” 

“’Get him’,” Gabriel repeated. He had heard everything and finally understood too, and yet there was something in his mind that refused to accept it, numb like a sedated limb that refused pain. 

“Oh, yes,” Slovinska said with a smile and turned to walk around the tank towards one of the work-stations. She went through stacks of papers and yanked open drawers like she was looking for something, chattering away: “Talon hires a lot of, hmm, ‘freelancers’, you know. You and I have that in common. Do you think someone of my caliber ends up in Talon out of chance? No no, the secret to these kinds of affairs is good benefits, I myself am here as an innovator. This laboratory is catered towards me and my work, nothing else. Nothing like this could exist anywhere else.” She seemed to have found what she had been looking for because she straightened up and turned to walk back to him. Gabriel saw her through the tank and its liquid, a slightly distorted version obscured with an occasional burst of bubbles and with a yellow tint.

Slovinska was still smiling. “Now, I don’t know much about hiring mercenaries, but I imagine your lot is harder to please than us scientists. After all, war is a simple trade, and you have everything you need and want with you. But this is something only Talon can offer you. You must be a valuable asset to them, agent Reyes, as they are willing to go this far to keep you.” 

Gabriel stared at her. He must have been making an amusing face because Sombra giggled into her hand. For once Gabriel didn’t care. “You’re… Giving him… to me? To keep?” 

Slovinska nodded sharply. “That’s right. Please, feel free to visit my laboratory in the future as well. I’m sure you’ll have more questions. And since the surprise is ruined… Well, I don’t mind you seeing my working process either.” She handed him a fresh clearance pass. “Here you go. Come by as much and as often as you like.” 

Gabriel accepted the little plastic card. He stared at it for a while before turning back to Jack. The liquid and the lights gave him an almost angelic glow, and Gabriel pulled the pass close to his chest like it could be snatched away from him. 

Jack wasn’t only close, he was _here_. With him. 

That something cold and numb trembled and came back to life like a petrified reptile in sunlight, turning back into something warm and beautiful and dangerous.


	2. Chapter 2

Nothing was the same afterwards. Even though Gabriel left the laboratory and climbed back up to the familiar parts of the base it had all changed somehow. He couldn’t just forget that Jack was here, only floors beneath his feet at all times, and things were happening to him. Being done to him, he corrected himself in his mind. 

When Gabriel left the laboratory so that Doctor Slovinska could get back to her programming, Sombra had joined him. Gabriel had already forgotten about why they had been there in the first place, and Sombra was clearly a little sour over his underwhelming reaction. As they traveled back to the lobby and above the surface again Gabriel briefly wondered what Sombra had wished for by bringing him down there. What had she expected? 

He couldn’t come up with anything compelling, and judging by how Sombra parted ways with him with just a wave of her hand and went to search for other distractions, he suspected she hadn’t really thought the thing through either. Maybe she had wished for simply something more: Maybe she had wished for Gabriel to get angry and dramatically possessive about his sworn enemy being captured without him, maybe she had wished for him to cackle manically, or perhaps fall onto his knees in horror and grief. 

Instead of any of those, Gabriel was mostly confused. Now that he was out of the strange, dimly lit laboratory with glowing tanks and mechanical human parts he was able to think more clearly and recognize that he had been stunned. Leftovers of shock were still tingling in his body, making him restless and numb and he knew from experience that it would be useless to try to get immediately back to work, so he headed to the practice range to clear his head and shake his body awake with a rigorous training routine and shooting something. 

With time and exercise the shock left his system and his mind cleared, but the image of Jack didn’t leave him. It was the only thing he couldn’t decide what to think of. All else he could brush aside; Talon’s hiring practices, their obvious concerns of his loyalty, the ethics of science… All were meaningless. But Jack. _His_ Jack, his helpless, fragile, grotesquely mutilated Jack there in a tank like an exotic fish in an aquarium. 

His beautiful Jack in the middle of a transformation from a man into something else. Slovinska had said she was reinventing humanity and upgrading him, and sure a woman so deep in her field of expertise and so driven by her idea of innovation fully believed all of it, but Gabriel couldn’t just accept her views at face value. 

It was hard to apply things like upgrading and innovation to a clearly mutilated test subject stuffed full of tubes and wires and held together with metal parts, and the more Gabriel thought of it the more questions popped up. What were they even planning to do with Jack? He would hardly be of any use unconscious, but anyone who thought they could just make Jack Morrison enlist to Talon would be completely insane. Why would anyone be making him new limbs to tear everything around him apart with? 

He wondered if Jack was in pain. It had been months since he had lost his limbs and they all looked well-healed, but he was constantly undergoing whatever the hell was included in “upgrading”. He was being broken down into pieces and put back together again with new parts. It would stand to reason that pain was almost naturally a part of that. 

Gabriel knew something of cybernetics and something of omnics, but nothing that would answer any of his questions right now, and if he was being completely honest with himself none of it would be of any interest to him if Jack wasn’t involved. 

His Jack. Jack whom he had lost. Jack whom he was about to receive as a gift. The thought was odd, but also disturbingly enticing. Gabriel found he couldn’t shake the thought at all, not with training, not with the weapons and equipment maintenance routine, and not with work, and when late in the evening he got to his quarters, crawled into his bed and tried to put the events of the day to rest, he found he couldn’t sleep either. 

He was back in the laboratory the very next day. Jack wasn’t in the tank this time. 

Jack was on one of the operating tables under a bright light, hooked into a large computer module next to the table with Doctor Slovinska leaning over him. Next to her stood two featureless, unclothed omnics, holding and handing her equipment per her requests. 

Gabriel made his way through the laboratory slowly, feeling like an intruder despite the clearance granted to him and suddenly very tense now that the glass was no longer separating him from Jack. He stalked around the tables and stations with his gaze locked onto Jack, taking in his form just as carefully as he had the day before. He was pale and looked even more vulnerable there on the table than in the tank. The thick cords had been disconnected with only the bare ports remaining, but the plastic tubes were still in place and all led to a bucket on the floor. 

Today Jack was one limb more complete than yesterday. He had one cybernetic arm, stretched on the table with its shell open, and Slovinska was working on its systems with a tiny torch. She lifted her eyes from her work when Gabriel was a table away and gave him a slightly surprised smile.

“Well good morning,” she greeted him. “I must confess, I wasn’t expecting you back this quickly. It’s no bother of course, make yourself comfortable.” 

Gabriel was about to greet her back, but the words stuck to his throat and he froze in place when he looked at Jack and noticed he was awake this time. Gabriel stared at his body strapped to the operating table, naked save for the white standard-issue boxer briefs, his chest raising and falling with deep breaths in a slow pace that was probably forced, a stony expression on his face and wide-open eyes staring at the ceiling. His breathing was huffing through his nostrils, his teeth bit together and jaw squared, but his eyes didn’t flicker. 

For a moment Gabriel felt hopelessly exposed and naked like he had been caught doing something perverse, but the moment passed and he noticed that Jack’s eyes didn’t turn to him. They didn’t move at all, just stared at the same spot without so much as a flicker, and when Gabriel dared to step closer and take another look he saw deep scarring around the man’s eyes that had both turned cloudy with clear gray spots where the alert pupils used to be. 

Jack couldn’t see him. He couldn’t see anything, and if Gabriel stayed quiet and Slovinska didn’t call him by his name, Jack wouldn’t even know he was there. A rush of something like excitement went through Gabriel. 

“We’re tuning the neural controls and hydraulics in all the new limbs,” Slovinska explained, nodding at the mechanical arm under work on the table. “Neural connections are simple enough nowadays, but to establish a control system with suitable time-lapse and enough force is a process of trial and error.” 

Gabriel nodded. He wanted to prolong the mystery of his identity for no other reason than that he could, and he took this opportunity to lean as close to Jack as he could. He looked older now, and there were definitely more scars all over him. There were cuts and gun shot wounds and some faded bruising, and this close Gabriel saw the white and pink scar tissue and wrinkled skin covering each stump left of his limbs. When he looked closer at the place where his arm used to be he saw long scars peeking underneath the artificial shoulder and chest plating.

He turned his gaze from Jack’s body to his face and took a long look at it secure in the knowledge that the other couldn’t look back at him. There were more lines in his skin and new scars striping his face, and the mask Soldier 76 wore seemed to have left permanent lines on his cheeks and jawline. Other than that Jack hadn’t changed much. It was still his face, his white hair and sharp chin and deep frown, and the longer Gabriel stared the more painfully his heart clenched. 

Slovinska handed the torch to one of the omics and requested a small screwdriver and a pair of tweezers in its place. The omnics moved with stiff robotic motions, not even a hint of personality or life about them, neither one making a single sound.

“Why don’t you say hello to him?” Slovinska suddenly suggested to Gabriel. “After all, this project involves you heavily. You’ll be here a lot too, I’m guessing.” 

Gabriel gave her a shrug before looking back down at Jack. He studied the man, his expression and his minimal motions while wondering what might happen if he introduced himself. Jack was clearly conscious even if he couldn’t move while strapped on the table, and Gabriel recognized the forcefully calm breathing as a torture-resistance tactic, and even though Jack couldn’t see him he must have been aware of his presence. Gabriel had both of his hands supported on the edge of the table and he was leaning so close the other must have felt his body temperature as well as hear him breathing and moving. 

They were right here, this close to each other with nothing separating them, and suddenly it was too much for Gabriel and his thumping heart and he simply said: “Hello, Jack.” 

Jack startled in his straps and a bewildered expression flashed on his face before he suppressed it. He didn’t say anything. 

“You recognize my voice, don’t you?” Gabriel continued. “I know it’s changed, but it’s still me and you know me, right?” 

Jack didn’t respond to him, but his breathing got heavier and his frown deepened. He looked more tense in his bonds than he had a moment ago, but other than that the stony façade held and the man remained passive. Somehow the situation made Gabriel think of interrogation rooms and long, tiring sessions when he had wrung information out of people who really didn’t want to surrender any. Jack might have been blind and without limbs, but he still had his wits and fighting spirit about him, and this stubborn act made Gabriel’s heart beat so hard it hurt. It had been so long since he had had a chance to be with Jack like this.

But for now it was clear that Jack didn’t plan on saying anything, and Gabriel let him be for now. He nodded towards the arm the doctor was working on. “That doesn’t seem to be working.”

Slovinska chuckled. “Oh, it works alright. But I could hardly work if my subject were to strangle me with my work in progress, don’t you think? The neural links are disabled.” 

“Hm. That makes sense,” Gabriel said while eyeing the rest of the ports. “Do you have the rest of the limbs finished?” 

“No,” Slovisnka answered. “Not yet. I have them all made and they are all functional and they connect to the main system, but they still need work. You see those tubes?” she pointed at the plastic ones inserted in Jack’s back, thighs and gut through plastic mouthpieces. “Those are for draining. Other than regular body waste they expel pus and inorganic product from the cyborgization. There are several things to consider when upgrading.” 

“I see,” Gabriel said, suddenly interested. He moved towards the foot of the table to take a better look at the ports installed in Jack’s thighs. There was barely any scarring there and that supported his theory of a clean, medical amputation here in the safety of the laboratory. But it sounded like cyborgization was anything but clean. A glance to the bucket the waste tubes lead to revealed several big plastic bags for various filthy fluids, and knowing that conjoining new parts into living flesh produced something that disgusting provoked a feeling of kinship in Gabriel. He had gotten used to the swarming feeling of his nanobots, the bad pain-days and how the decay came and went in cycles, but one's own inhumanity didn’t get any easier to cope with. 

Slovinska watched them with interest for a moment before getting back to work, and neither one tried to start a conversation anymore. Still Gabriel stayed even though there was nothing to see or do. He still hadn’t figured out what to think about this, and so he let different impulses and emotions wrestle in his mind as he just stared at his former best friend who couldn’t look back at him. 

“There we go,” Slovinska suddenly said, snapping Gabriel out of his thoughts. She snapped the casing of the arm closed, took a screwdriver and some sort of an electrical device resembling both a pen and a drill and started to work on the joint of the arm. She pulled out screws and undid fastenings, pulled apart wires and shook parts loose until the arm snapped off the shoulder. She handed the arm to one of her mute omnic assistants and threw Gabriel a smile. 

“I’m done with this now. I’ll take that arm to the rest of the set and write down the progress of today. You can stay here if you wish.” And with that she turned and walked out with her assistants in tow. 

Gabriel was left alone with Jack. Neither one said anything at first, but the atmosphere clearly shifted. 

“You look pretty miserable like this, Jack,” Gabriel said, leaning on the edge of the table. “I heard you tried to take on a Talon squad on your own. How did that work out for you?” 

Jack didn’t answer him, just kept up with his breathing. Gabriel wondered if him being blind had its upsides since he didn’t have to decide whether to avoid or meet anyone’s gaze and thus it was harder to play dominance games with him. 

“You can play mute all you like, Jack. You aren’t going anywhere,” Gabriel said. “Or, well… You might be able to flop down from the table but that wouldn’t take you very far. And even if you managed to keep flopping, you wouldn’t know which way the door is, would you now?” Gabriel didn’t know why he was saying these things; they were all very obvious and stating them aloud led nowhere. He didn’t feel the need to assert his dominance either, and there was no power trip to be had over a blind, quadri-amputated man. 

Jack gave a dry laugh. “You sure have missed me, huh,” he rasped. 

Gabriel was taken aback by the comment, not only because Jack had given up his statue imitation, but because he was probably right. The realization was startling yet oddly satisfying since now he had a name for the feeling. “Oh look, he speaks,” was all he could think to say. 

Jack grunted dismissively. “I have nothing to say to anyone here.” 

“Except to me, I see,” Gabriel pointed out. 

Jack huffed, his upper lip twitching with something that could have been nerves, could have been disgust. 

“Come on, don’t be like that,” Gabriel said with a roll of his eyes, fearing the other would shut down again. “You and I know each other, nothing will undo that, at least not pretending like we were nothing.” 

“Hads and beens is all we have,” Jack replied sourly. 

The words cut, but immediately they were followed with something warm like a healing balm as Gabriel gazed at Jack’s current state, his transformation in progress. “Oh, we have more than that,” he said, “we have the future.” 

Now there was clearly disgust on Jack’s face, and his jaw squared when he ground his teeth together. Gabriel watched Jack twitching in his bounds with interest and wondered if he had forgotten that he didn’t have limbs anymore and was trying to make a gesture of some sort. It was rather pathetic and oddly endearing to watch a human being in such a state: without his arms and legs the proportions of his remaining body were all wrong, and his body language had disappeared in an unnatural manner. 

“You don’t need to worry,” Gabriel spoke after the silence stretched too much. “This is not an amateur lab. You’ll recover.” 

“Like you recovered?”

Gabriel flinched and felt his skin crawl. He suddenly wished he had his mask on even though it was a useless shield against Jack’s blind eyes and biting words. “Beats dying,” he said. 

Jack chuckled joylessly. “Does it really? How much can a human being give up and still be alive, I wonder?”

The question might have been relevant but it was also stupidly abstract and too vague to be answered, and it was easy for Gabriel to by-pass. After all, he had pondered such questions in the past and it had all turned out useless. Ethics dealt on a higher planes of existence, in the world of ideas and concepts, and in the end when everything was said and done what really mattered was what real human beings felt and thought. Gabriel might have gotten rid of all his mirrors a long time ago and had had to learn to deal with the feeling of not quite belonging among his fellow men, but he had never felt inhuman. He had never felt as if he had transformed into a new creature or stopped being the same man he had been ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t think about stuff like that and instead focus on the practical side of things,” Gabriel suggested. He sighed. “I for one feel a bit nostalgic about this all.” 

Jack’s brows flew up. “Nostalgic? Which part, exactly?” he asked in disbelief. 

Gabriel shrugged. “It’s not the first time you and I undergo changes together, now is it?” he pointed out softly. “The first time we met we were under similar circumstances.” 

Jack blinked a few times and slowly his surprise turned back into a deep frown again. His mouth opened but it seemed that he couldn’t decide what he wanted to say, so he just made a huffing sound in the back of his throat and shook his head. His shoulder twitched, and Gabriel wondered what kind of a gesture he had wanted to make. 

“This… This is nothing like SEP,” Jack finally managed to say with a strained voice. 

Gabriel scoffed. “We are in a basement subjected to research that aims to reach the next stage in human evolution. I can see why you would want to think that as a once in a lifetime thing, but it would seem that it’s boring everyday life here.” 

Jack actually laughed at that, but the sound was cold and shrill, and his face was even paler than moments ago. His frown grew grimmer, but Gabriel had already spotted the tell-tale signs of fear lurking under there. 

“Gabe…” Jack breathed, his voice strained and tense. “They sawed my legs off. They put me in a can like ground tuna. I have a hole in my stomach where a piece of a garden hose is connected to my intestine so I will be clean and easy to handle. This… This is _nothing_ like SEP, and you... You’re nothing more than another torturer.” 

The warm feeling of comfort washed out of Gabriel like a sweet daydream and suddenly he didn’t feel like talking anymore. He turned his face away from Jack to avoid looking at his fearful snarl and chopped up body, but wherever he turned in the lab he saw things he didn’t want to: human parts hanging from hooks, the tank glowing sickly yellow, the tools, the machines. 

“How do you even think they will keep me here?” Jack continued. “Nothing will keep me here. They’ll have to kill me, Gabe, and you know it. Otherwise the moment I have functioning arms and legs I will kill everything within my reach. I will never join Talon. I will never join you. “

With the veil of daydream washed away Gabriel knew it to be true, and the words hit him hard and merciless. Soundlessly he slipped into his wraith form and slipped away from Jack’s side, taking a small amount of petty joy knowing that Jack wouldn’t know he had gone. 

The words stayed with him, however, and once they had been spoken he couldn’t shake them off. The rational side of Gabriel knew that Jack was his weak point, someone who affected his rationality and concentration, clouded his goals and made him question himself, but this time he knew that Jack had a point.

How would they keep Jack there? How exactly Doctor Slovinska and whoever green-lit her idea were planning to give Jack to him? He wasn’t a doll to pass around as they pleased, no, he was a remarkably hard-headed and tough man, and Gabriel knew his former partner well enough to know that he would sooner die than submit. 

The realization ate at Gabriel and it felt like losing Jack all over again. He lay awake in his bed at night with his thoughts fixed on the loss of Jack, playing it again over and over, and leaving him wondering at how senselessly cruel it was to tease him with the possibility of being together with Jack once more if he was only going away again. The thought was relentless, the truth too stubborn to leave him, and Gabriel couldn’t sleep with it stuck in his head. 

Jack might have been here, secure and close, but he wouldn’t be his. He wouldn’t be with him. 

The thought kept him awake and after four days it drove him to seek out Doctor Slovinska when she had her subject safely unconscious inside the tank. 

“You will never keep him here,” he said out of the blue. 

Doctor Slovinska lifted her gaze from her work. She had the bare bones of a cyborg limb on her table with its wires spread open, and she was leading electricity to it, making it twitch and kick on the surface. “What do you mean?” she asked politely. 

Gabriel was lingering on the other side of the table, leg jiggling and trying not to look at the limb jerking on the table like a shred of something undead. “I mean your project there,” he specified, making a jerking motion towards the tank behind them. “It’s easy now that you have him paralyzed and blind and hooked into your computers, but what makes you even entertain the thought that after you’ve finished him he’d stay with us?” 

Doctor Slovinska put her equipment down and the limb thankfully fell down as lifeless as before. “What is this about? Don’t you want him after all?” 

Gabriel crossed his arms and his leg bounced harder. He averted his gaze. “Of course I want him,” he muttered, “but he doesn’t want this. He’ll fight and he’ll run.” 

Slovinska hummed and got up from her saddle chair, hands slipping in the pockets of her lab-coat. “Your concerns are not unfounded,” she admitted, “but it’s something we have already considered. We have our ways, don’t worry. After I’m finished, truly finished, he’ll stay.” 

Gabriel turned his gaze back to her. The woman looked as serene and professional as ever, mundane and careless, but also very certain of herself. She had a habit of making Gabriel feel foolish for doubting her and asking questions. 

“What’s the finishing touch, then?” he asked. 

Slovinska gave him a smile, turned and started to walk away, beckoning him with her. “Come and I will show you.” 

She made her way past her various computers and operating tables to an unassuming side door. It was heavy and made of metal, had a small window in it and required a swipe from the doctor’s clearance pass to let them through. 

The side room turned out to be a brightly lit cool room of some sort. It was no bigger than a regular office, it was pure white and without any furniture, only drawers stacked on all walls from floor to ceiling. In one corner there were a few black crates that clearly didn't belong there with the drawers and bright lights. 

Slovinska walked to one stack of drawers, with ease found the one she was needed and pressed it gently to make it open automatically. The drawer opened with a hiss and a cloud of nitrogen poured out. Slovinska threw Gabriel a look and jerked her head in a beckoning manner, and he stalked closer. 

The insides of the drawer resembled a white honeycomb made of glass, but only one of the cells was occupied. There was a small black chip no bigger than a fingernail, frozen and inconspicuous. 

“What is that?” Gabriel asked. 

“It's the final piece,” Slovinska said. She produced a small rod from a breast pocket of her coat, a tool with a copper-wire tip humming with current, and pocked the chip with it. A small amount of current zapped into it, and suddenly it flared with a dozen smoky tendrils, small but long, flooding the whole cell it was confined it. The tiny amount of white current went through the smoke like a lightning inside a cloud, and then the smoke swallowed it. The current was eaten up, and the tendrils shrunk, disappearing back inside the chip that looked much too small to host them, and in a few seconds the chip was again as innocent looking like it had been a moment ago. 

Gabriel stared into the drawer with a frown on his face, feeling an odd sense of familiarity at the tech. 

Slovinska pushed the rod back inside her coat. “I haven't named this yet, but its working title was Regulator. I designed its prototypes for my omnic designs during the Crisis to regulate external connection. It was a sort of an enforced firewall to make my omnics harder to hack, but they also had the tendency to block out any external information, including sensory data and linguistic cues prompting problem-solving, so the line was discontinued. I took the basic design, adapted it according to the needs of a cyborg, and now we have a Regulator for a human brain.” 

She sounded immensely pleased with herself, practically radiating pride and self-satisfaction, but Gabriel felt an ominous churn in his gut. 

“So... if it prevents hacking the system of an omnic, what does it do to a human brain?” he asked. 

“Whatever I program it to do,” Slovinska said. “Like I mentioned, I create closed systems, so I have to perfect this one's code and add it last because afterwards it can't be altered. Once I reboot Cyborg 76, the program will become independent.”

“But what does it _do_?” Gabriel repeated. 

Slovinska shrugged. “I could explain the processes in a neurological sense, but I suppose you wouldn't understand much and it would bore you, so simply put: It will make him a bit more mellow and put him into a working condition.” 

Gabriel wasn't a scientist and the Doctor was probably right, but still he would have liked a bit more detailed answer on what she was about to do to Jack's brain. “You aren't... You aren't going to wipe him, are you?” he asked. 

Slovinska hummed a polite little laugh and pushed the drawer closed again. “No, of course not! We need his abilities, skills and knowledge after all! Besides, a human brain is a very networked, complex organ. I could wipe an omnic since their memory is stored neatly in one place, but we humans are another thing entirely. No, this is just some light redirecting of what's already there, and regulating the future input. He will remember everything as it was. You, for example.” 

Gabriel didn't like the twinkle in her voice when she answered the unspoken part of his question, but he was too relieved to really care. His gut settled, but he was left a bit shaky in the aftermath. 

Slovinska turned her back to the wall and let her gaze circle the empty room as she fixed her bun, casual and conversational as if they were on a coffee break in an office. “My assistants here have the omnic model of the Regulator. I tested them both very thoroughly, and all the memories are still there. I looked, and all the files are untouched, the processes undisturbed, and still they work here in my lab, both very content.” 

“You didn't build them, then?” Gabriel asked. 

“Oh, no, just remodeled them after they were passed to me by the higher-ups. As I said, we, the science department, are quite spoiled here,” she said with a smile. “The model for organic system does the same. Your new partner will have all his memories exactly as they are, he'll just feel about them differently, that's all.” 

Gabriel felt cold in all his limbs as he turned this new information over in his mind. Of course Jack wouldn't stay there with them as he was now, in fact he would most likely choose to go out in a hail of bullets sooner that join Talon, but could it really be solved with just that little chip and then turning it off and on again? It was hard to believe. 

But then again, Talon did have a frighteningly competent and resourceful science department and no shortage of money to give them. Gabriel recalled distantly how in what felt like a hundred years ago he had rolled his eyes at Angela's ethical concerns about putting the Shimada boy back together. At the time he hadn't understood what was so hard about it. The boy needed a body to survive and Angela could at least try to build him one, and the were exactly two options: Try and succeed, or do nothing and let him die. To him the choice had been obvious, and Angela's muttering about ethics and humanity and her vows had felt like a waste of time an energy. 

Now Gabriel thought he understood what she had been going on about back then, at least if the chill in him was anything to go by. Exactly how much one could alter? What the actual effects would be? Slovinska sounded certain enough, but Gabriel could also gather that Jack was the first actual human being her tech would be tested on, and the thought made him uneasy.

But no matter how much he worried, his thoughts ended up at the same point over and over again: It was either the chip or loss. All the consequences might have still been a mystery, but the choice was easy. 

Slovinska was watching him with keen eyes, perhaps trying to figure out what he thought of all this. She had a new tone in her voice when she spoke again, something softer, almost persuasive: “We kept the things he had on him when we brought him in, you know. They are in that top crate if you'd care to look through them. Maybe you could tell how much of it will be useful when he's finished and could join you on active duty?” 

_Join you_. Those were the magic words. Gabriel simply nodded. 

Slovinska looked pleased. “Wonderful! Feel free to take it with you to your quarters, here it just takes up space.” 

Gabriel did. His quarters didn't have much more room but then again there was nothing to take up that space either, so he happily carried all of Jack's belongings there. The crate wasn't that heavy, only the pulse-rifle putting real weight there, and in his room Gabriel simply turned it over his bed, letting all the things spill on top of the covers. 

Sorting through it all didn't take much time, and in the end he had two piles: weapons and clothes. The pulse-rifle had been taken apart to make it fit into the crate, but all the parts were there along with several rounds of ammo. Gabriel suspected there had been more but most of it had been re-purposed; no use in wasting perfectly good ammo after all. Along with the gun parts were half a dozen biotic field generators, the visor Jack wore and that apparently helped him see, and then there were clothes. 

Gabriel set Jack's heavy army-grade boots on the floor and focused on the other articles instead. His ridiculous biker jacket was there, still smelling faintly of ammunition and gasoline. There was some light body-armour and similar undershirts Gabriel wore under his own gear, army-grade trousers, a belt, socks, gloves. All very impersonal, all very familiar. 

He went through all the pockets as well, but found nothing aside from lint and a crumbled up receipt from a gas-station somewhere in Louisiana. 

He unfolded the black shirt just for the sake of being thorough, and when he did something fell out of the bundle. Gabriel tossed the shirt aside to see what it was, and there lying on his bed was a simple steel chain, sturdy but still clearly meant for a necklace, and in the chain was a silver ring. 

Gabriel picked the ring up and took a closer look at it. It was plain, had sharp angles, and inside had a simple carving: “J.M & G.R 2052”

He felt his mouth turning dry and his heart thumping painfully again as he held the small artifact. For some reason he felt a strangling feeling in his throat and for a minute he was truly afraid he was going to have an overtly sentimental episode of some sort, but he forced himself to swallow it. He gathered all the stuff back into the crate and pushed it under his bed, not thinking anything about it. 

But the chain with the ring on it Gabriel put around his own neck and under his shirt, letting it rest against his collar safe and secure, and there it stayed when he went to bed to mostly lay awake, when he got up the next morning, and every moment after that. 

He touched it with his fingers through his clothes every time he wanted a reassurance of that long-ago made promise still holding, and that this was simply another way to stay true to it.


	3. Chapter 3

The ring felt like a burning weight around his neck when he wandered back to the laboratory the next day. He had restrained himself from going there immediately after his alarm marked the time to get up and instead had put in some work, training and even a lunch in fear of starting to draw attention to himself by neglecting his duties. If Slovinska was to be completely believed and the higher command had indeed intended Jack to become something of a motivator and a tie-down his obvious interest in him might just prove them right, but Gabriel didn't want to show it too much: if he were to spend all of his waking hours down there around Jack the situation would eventually start to look too much like a weak point in him. Jack might have been captured by Talon and upgraded according to their science department, but after that process was complete and the chip activated he would become Gabriel's partner again, and if the opening in his armour was too big and too obvious, who knew what might be added to Jack's programming. What if they amplified his loyalty to Talon? What if he would become cold and controlling, tying Gabriel down here more actively than by just being a gift? What if they threatened to take him away again if they didn't perform well enough? 

Gabriel fingered the ring through his shirt and college hoodie. He knew it couldn't be seen, but he felt it there. The promise. He and Jack should exist within their own cycle, and to give anyone any ideas about making that partnership conditional was unthinkable. 

In the laboratory one of the operating tables was prepped up and ready for use, all clean and shining under extra lights, two trolleys full of instruments ready next to it. Gabriel wandered inside and consciously removed his hand from the ring, and used it to remove his mask instead. It was a bit of a bother to put his mask on every morning just to come down here and take it off and toss it to the nearest table, but it was a part of his carefully constructed image, and if he were to slip up on keeping that together he knew he'd be too far down this particular rabbit hole. 

It seemed he had appeared just in time to see the doctor's two omnic assistants getting Jack out of the tank. There was an a-shaped steel ladder next to it, the hatch on top of the tank was open and the omnics were pulling the man's limp body out of the chemical bath while untangling the various wires attached and coming out of him. One unfastened the oxygen mask he was wearing and smoothly pulled a soft plastic tube out of his throat while the other held Jack's head back, then cast the apparatus back to the tank. The various wires hooked into ports in Jack's back and flank were disconnected as well and tossed after it, and lastly the omnic gathered the waste tubes into a bunch, tied them together with a zip-tie and put them into a bucket the other was holding. With Jack completely detached from the tank and its systems, they started to carry him down the steps and towards the operating table, leaving a trail of thick liquid behind them. 

Gabriel stepped aside and followed the company to the table where the silent assistants put Jack before starting to prepare him for whatever was scheduled for today, neither one acknowledging Gabriel in any way. One took a towel from one of the trolleys and started to wipe the man and the table dry while the other took plastic pouches to stick the waste tubes to. 

Gabriel inched closer to the table, on the other side than the one where the instruments were displayed, just outside the blinding shine of the lights, and peered down at Jack. He seemed to be unconscious and remained completely still as the omnics tied him down onto the table with the straps around his shoulders and thighs as every time before. 

Jack was still without limbs. If anything it seemed that the process had gone backwards since the unraveled look of his arms had changed closer to the condition of his legs with most of the thick cables either cut shorter or removed completely. 

“Ah, you're early today!” Slovinska said instead of greeting. She had been hauled into the chemistry lab and now approached the operating table clad in a plastic apron and latex gloves reaching her elbows, her hair tugged under a paper cap. She took her place next to the operating table with ease while Gabriel took a step back. Slovinska shrugged. “Or just in time, which ever you prefer. In time for today, anyway.” 

She didn't wait for Gabriel to answer anything but started to pull up the tools and instruments she needed for today, which apparently included at least a scalpel, forceps and a small torch. 

Jack shifted on the table, and Gabriel's attention turned to him. He had no idea what the doctor was giving him to keep him under in the tank, but every time Jack woke up he came to very slowly and appeared to be confused and groggy. Gabriel watched him blinking his blind eyes in vain and struggle weakly in his bindings with a look on his face that was so innocently oblivious it made his heart ache. He watched it in silence and safely hovering where he had learned was just far enough to not be picked up by any of his senses, and when Jack came to a bit more and seemed to remember where he was Gabriel watched that open confusion twitch and turn into that stony expression of a man determined to endure. 

Slovinska was done arranging her tools and had moved onto squirting disinfectant on the stump of Jack's leg, wiping the table with it too before picking up a syringe from a tray to give her subject the usual shot of local anesthesia. 

Gabriel didn't care to spy the routine he knew already fully well. He focused on Jack's tight frown, his white lower lip and the flickering of his blank eyes, and listened to his rhythmic and labored breaths. 

Slovinska got to work and used a small screwdriver to detach the metal casing on the bottom of the stump, setting both the part and the tool aside. She pushed two of her fingers inside the limb and started to fish out cords and bundles of wires no thicker than her little finger, things she had installed and fused with flesh. She dug out the wiring from the flesh, sorted them carefully and then picked up her scalpel. Very carefully she cut one of the cords open, its silicon skin revealing smaller wires and tiny systems, circuits and chips and copper-wires fused together with the tiniest of weldings. The cord came undone, the insides spilling from the cramped skin, and then the real work began. Slovinska reached for her other trolley and for the fine tools. She put hooks on the cord to keep it open, and then bent over it with forceps and a tiny electrical torch in hand, one so small its flame was only a white dot. 

Her torch came in contact with the insides of the cord, and Jack let out of raspy shout, making Gabriel jump. 

Slovinska ignored the reaction and kept on with her work while Jack shuddered weakly and groaned behind his gritting teeth. 

Gabriel frowned in mild alarm, glancing down at Jack whose face had screwed into a scowl of pain as he tried to weakly struggle against his bonds, and then looking at the woman working on the insides of the leg, unfazed. 

“I thought you gave him anesthesia?” Gabriel said. 

“I did,” Slovinska said, “it's doing its job, I assure you. It's just that I'm working on the neural network, and there's really nothing to be done about this. It's like a root canal therapy to your leg, it's bound to hurt. Don't worry about it.” 

“Right,” Gabriel muttered and dropped the subject, but he did shift closer to the table, taking a place at the head and leaned above Jack. 

The man on the table was taking deep breaths through his nose, the air hissing as he obviously refused to pant. He kept his teeth bitten together but groans and grunts occasionally escaped from his throat, and his face was quickly turning even paler than usual with sweat brimming on his brow. 

Gabriel touched his hand to his chest and felt the ring under his hoodie. “How long will this take?” he asked. 

“I don't know,” Slovinska said absentmindedly, “some hours I suppose. If everything goes well, that is.” 

Gabriel let his hands drop from his chest and land on the table on both sides of Jack's head. “It looks painful,” he muttered, almost whispered down at the man. Jack didn't react to his comment in any way, and Gabriel didn't really know what he had expected. 

He watched the man a while longer, watched him breathe and grit his teeth and occasionally gasp when something even more sensitive was jabbed or scourged. Sweat was turning his face clammy but Jack kept as quiet as he had been from the start, the first yelp in surprise remaining his only scream. Not that it made watching any easier. 

Carefully and attempting stealth Gabriel let his hands creep closer to Jack's head, careful not to draw Slovinska's attention even though it wouldn't matter if he did, eventually letting his knuckles brush against Jack's cheeks. 

Jack jerked in his bindings when they touched and opened his mouth to let out a pained moan. The choked back shivering sound was a very short one, pulled out of him by surprise, and he snapped his jaws shut right after it. 

Gabriel didn't recoil. He kept his hands against Jack's cheeks, lightly brushing his knuckles against his cheeks, a ghost of a petting touch, and when no resistance came – like any was possible in the first place – he slowly turned his hands over to turn the shy caress into a proper hold. 

He felt Jack's jaw tensing as he grit his teeth and the sweat on the skin against his palms. He felt the feverish warmth of his skin, the rough stubble and the strangely sticky leftovers of the solution from the tank. Gabriel brushed his thumbs up and down Jack's cheeks, following the arc of the bone there, gentle out of a habit he thought he had lost a long time ago. 

Jack's eyes didn't move. Of course they didn't, but they were an odd sight to behold, and their unfocused stare was slightly unnerving even if it allowed Gabriel to stare back at him as openly and rudely as he liked. He wondered how much Jack could tell about his surroundings with his other senses. Did he know how close Gabriel was? Could he tell that he was leaning on the table, hovering above him and staring at him? Did he care? Was Jack comforted by having his face cradled? Was he secretly enjoying it?

Gabriel's thoughts were swimming and he knew he was fooling himself, but he allowed that much for himself since the other option would be to keep his distance and just watch him suffer. This way it felt like he was sharing the experience, the feeling of being cut open and laid out bare, something Gabriel knew very well from experience, and being here with Jack and sharing that felt oddly good. Being with Jack felt good. 

By the time Slovinska was finished with the leg Jack was no longer gritting his teeth but panting out shallow breaths and occasionally groaning. Gabriel's thumbs brushed droplets of sweat when he caressed him, and when Slovinska finally zipped the coils and wires up and pushed them back inside the carved cavity within Jack's thigh, Jack fell limp on the table, his head lolling to one side to rest against Gabriel's palm. 

“There,” Slovinska said, stood up and stretched. “Let's take a little break before the other one.” She wandered off with a vague mention of getting coffee before starting again, and Gabriel and Jack were left alone. 

Jack's cheek was damp and flushed against Gabriel's palm and his breath came out in shivering pants. Gabriel saw him mouthing a mute swear word to himself. 

“Halfway done for today,” Gabriel said, a vague encouragement born out of the same habit as his gentle touch. 

Jack released a trembling laugh before anxiously licking his chapped lips. “As if that helps anything,” he said. “This will all just repeat tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that and the day after that until that bitch does a modernized lobotomy on me.” 

Gabriel startled and his fingers twitched. “You won't be lobotomized,” he said. “And this won't go on forever, only as long as is needed for you to get new limbs. You want new limbs, don't you?” 

“When I get new limbs I will stop existing as I am,” Jack said sourly. His words rolled off his tongue sluggish and slurred, and Gabriel gathered the operation had already taken its toll on both his motoric abilities and mental state. 

“You won't be lobotomized,” Gabriel repeated, firmer this time. 

Jack was silent, his face blank and pained. “Believe what you want then.” 

Slovinska came back after fifteen minutes or so away, a spring in her step and just finishing a cup of coffee. She circled around the operating table with her drink, stopped by a computer to check on the data and updated it with new results, paying no mind to her subject or her guest. 

It was all good for Gabriel, he didn't want to chat with her anyway, but he did wish she would just get on with the rest of today's operation so he could just go back holding and petting Jack instead of turning over his bitter words in his mind. His choice of words was gnawing at him. Lobotomy. How cruel and brutal. 

The other stump of Jack's leg was opened up in the same manner as the one before had, the coils and circuits pulled out and the tuning with a torch and forceps continuing. Slovinska worked in silence once again, and Jack kept flinching and squirming in his bounds, breathing heavily. 

This time Gabriel studied his body more than his face, taking in every set of scars and bruises, the medical ports with their tubes as well as the missing limbs. He watched waste passing through the draining tubes into the pouches inside the bucket on the floor. He watched Jack's chest laboring with his breath. He studied the reddish scars where man turned machine, like welding marks on flesh. He watched the helpless wiggling of his shoulders and thighs, the movements strangely empty and unnatural now that there were no hands to complete the gestures or feet to kick or toes to curl. 

Jack was a fool to think this would go on any longer than necessary; what possible use was he to anyone like this? He needed new limbs and a Regulator, then they could go back to work. 

The second leg took just as much time as the first one but it felt longer, mainly because Jack wiggled and whined more this time around. He turned and tossed his head so much that Gabriel couldn't hold him anymore, so he slipped his hands to his collar instead, his palms touching flesh but his fingers feeling metal. 

The operating table was a mess of oil, grease and clear bodily fluids when the session was done. Whatever data had been collected today seemed to please Slovinska greatly because she practically beamed at her computer, muttering to herself about proper tests and better results before turning to her omnic assistant and ordering them to clean up and then prepare the engineering workstation for her. After that she arranged the data tables on her computer before shutting it down and marching out of the laboratory to her lunch break, her step light and head held up proud and satisfied. 

Gabriel watched her go and lingered behind. He let go of Jack and stepped a bit to the side, hopefully not quite disappearing from his world but giving him some space, hopping to sit on the empty and nearly identical table next to the one Jack was lying on. 

Jack was sweaty all over and his breath was all rough gasps and shuddering sighs, but he was visibly forcing himself to calm down. His pale skin glowed in the bright lights, sickly-looking from not seeing sunlight in months and damp with pained sweat. 

The omnics picked up the tools and the paper sheets from the table and wiped away the stains of fluids and machine discharge. They mutely picked up all the surgical tools used and wheeled them off to be cleaned, leaving the two men alone in silence. 

After a moment of consideration Gabriel quietly slid down from the table and moved to undo the straps keeping Jack bound to the table. Jack's breathing stilled for a second when Gabriel first touched his skin below the straps, but he didn't move or say anything as the other released him from the grip.

“If it's the machinery you're worried about, don't be,” Gabriel muttered as he loosened the ties. “You'll be faster and stronger. It's just enhancement.”

Jack scoffed. “I liked my limbs as they were, thank you very much. All fleshy and weak and human.”

“I've been enhanced too,” Gabriel said, ignoring Jack's sour tone. “It may set us apart from the rest, but it's better too. I can survive things no other human can, and even though your changes are more visible than mine, mine are actually more dramatic. Looks mean nothing.” 

Jack scoffed again. “Easy for you to say, you can think for yourself. You are still you, as much as I don't like the man you became.”

The comment hurt, Gabriel couldn't deny it, but he bit his tongue and just undid the two remaining straps. “You will be you too,” he said. “I wouldn't have it any other way.” 

It was Jack's turn to be quiet. It was a shut-down kind of silence, completely unreadable like a stone wall, and Gabriel found he didn't know the man well enough anymore to even make guesses. The realization made his heart clench, and suddenly he couldn't wait for the operation to be complete so he could do away with this frustrating pain of his.

“What do you want from me?” Jack asked then, quiet and solemn but his voice almost soft. 

Gabriel felt squeezing pain in his chest again, but more at the tone than at the question itself. “Losing you hurt, you know. Maybe there was no helping it, maybe it was gradual, maybe it happened slowly and a long time ago, but it hurt all the same. And it still does.” 

Gabriel paused, but Jack didn't have anything to add.

“I want to keep you, Jackie,” he said, his voice coming out thin and hoarse, no louder than a whisper. 

Silence between them stretched on and on, neither on saying a thing.

“Maybe this is why I left you in the first place,” Jack whispered.

Gabriel bit his lip and said nothing. It was nothing new, but it was only a part of the truth. The fall of their relationship had been a gradual corrosion. Their unofficial union, no matter how romantic, just didn't make it through their lives. Maybe defying the official guide-lines and policies and actually getting married could have saved them, or maybe not. Their love had soured slowly, growing from affection and devotion into a burden and pain, and one day like an undetected illness killed them both.

He reached under his collar and pulled the chain over his head. “You don’t mean that,” he said. 

“Mean what?” 

“About leaving me. You didn’t want to. I know you didn’t,” Gabriel said.

Jack huffed and rolled his shoulders, the metal of the stumps scratching against the table’s surface. “Yes, I did. Deal with it, Gabe.” 

In response Gabriel shook the chain in his hand, making the silver ring rattle and jingle. The noise made Jack freeze, and Gabriel knew he didn’t have to let him feel the piece of jewelry to recognize it. 

“I found this among your stuff,” Gabriel said, spinning the ring in its chain. “You kept this. You kept wearing my ring around your neck and against your heart all this time, and you say that means nothing? Don’t try to argue anything else, I’m not an idiot.” 

Jack turned his face away and remained silent. Gabriel put the chain back around his neck and slipped the ring back under his shirt again, hidden from any gaze but real for him. “Didn’t think so,” he said, satisfied. 

Jack made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat, sounding like he was about to suffocate on something. He thrashed on the table in discomfort and without his bindings managed to actually move around a bit. He moved like a seal on dry land, clumsy and slow and most likely wary he would fall of the table, and the cords attached to his shoulders flung back and forth like loose ropes.  
Again Gabriel stepped closer and watched that sad squirming and flopping, beholding one of the most dangerous men in the world in a state of absolute helplessness. For a moment Gabriel wished he had the tactical visor with him so he could allow Jack to look at him when they were like this. He looked heartbreakingly helpless. 

“Come now, Jackie, don’t be like that,” he murmured soothingly, leaning closer. “I won’t tell anyone, and I won’t hold it against you. But I’ll keep you close and safe from now on. You don’t have to worry about a thing as long as I’m here.” 

Jack spat, looking furious. “Do you actually believe any of that?! Do you think I don’t remember everything your people have done to me, and how you just stand there doing nothing?!” 

“Shhh,” Gabriel whispered softly. “We’re all test subject here, one way or another. It’ll be alright in the end, I promise.” He reached out towards the other. 

“I’d rather - “ Jack started but gasped suddenly, swallowing the rest of the sentence with compulsive gasps for air. “Don’t touch me,” he managed to choke out. 

Gabriel made a calming humming sound but didn’t make a gesture to remove his hands from where Jack’s left thigh was cut. He braced the heels of his palms against the metal port sunken into the flesh and used his fingers to knead circles into the scarred flesh above it. “You don’t have to thank me, but you’ll feel better after, trust me,” he said and continued. The skin was bumpy with scars and the muscles were stiff, but all in all the work there was rather clean. Gabriel massaged the remaining limb with firm squeezes and rubbed circles in his skin with his fingers while Jack feebly attempted to squirm away from him. 

“You’ll end up on the floor if you keep doing that, and I’ll just pick you up and put you back on the table if you do. Stay still,” Gabriel said with a roll of his eyes. The only response he got from Jack was a chocked back noise before he stilled.

“Better,” Gabriel said. He kneaded the thigh for a time, paying special attention to the seam between the flesh and the metal and keeping his hold gentle without being too light. After he was satisfied with the limb, he moved on the right thigh and repeated the treatment. 

After that Gabriel moved up to Jack’s shoulders, and when he lay his hands on his collar and the juncture between his shoulder and neck he happened to glance at his face, and the sight made him still for a second: Jack had his lower lip in a tight chewing hold between his teeth and pink spots had appeared all over his pale face, but what really drew Gabriel’s attention were the tears, freely flowing down his cheeks and into the crook of his jaw and the shells of his ears.  
Gabriel watched them for a second, listening to Jack’s wet inhales and the stuffy gulping noises every now and then, and after the moment passed focused on the remaining parts of his limbs again. It took a moment to find the skin and flesh left of the shoulders since nothing of his arms remained, but soon enough Gabriel found something soft just above his shoulder blades and above his collar bone to sink his fingertips into. 

When he glanced at Jack’s face again the tears were still running and showed no signs of stopping. 

“I know, Jackie, I know,” Gabriel sighed and turned his gaze from his face. 

Touching the cyborg parts of him was strange, like his own muscle memory expected something different and when received metal and plastic became confused, but still he felt around the thick cables attached to Jack's shoulders. He wrapped his fingers around them, rearranged them and wondered how could they possibly become arms, especially since they felt so alien, even when attached to a living host. 

“Your hands are cold,” Jack muttered under his breath, his voice stuffy from sobs he held back. “Dead cold.” 

Gabriel stilled for a fraction of a second before resuming with the kneading. He hadn't noticed, but now that he looked down at his own hands and really paid attention he noticed they were indeed blackened and peeling off their skin today. 

“Ah. This comes and goes. Everything dies and is then remade,” he explained in passing, too busy wondering about himself and how he hadn't noticed the state of his hands before. He had gotten too used to the constant ache of it to really pay attention, but being near Jack should have made him notice.

Gabriel had imagined touching Jack before. During the past six years, he had often thought – and dreamed – about various instances where he might get to touch Jack again, to tear and claw at him, to wrap his fingers around his neck and squeeze, to slam against him and taste blood on his lips, but in every single dream he was always wearing his full gear. Even in his dreams Gabriel recognized his ruined state, the tide of decay he existed with, and he knew something like him wasn't supposed to be touching anything living. He had both yearned for and hated those dreams, and after each one he had always taken that self-hatred and re-aimed it outside once again with a mental maneuver that felt like turning his own skin inside out. 

But no longer. Here he was, his bare hands on Jack's bare skin, and it wasn't an abomination. 

“We are alike again,” Gabriel mumbled out loud, and slick sense of satisfaction slid into his gut, warming him from inside. “You are like me now.” 

“What? A mutilated cripple?” Jack asked, managing a sarcastic tone even with his cheeks wet with tears. 

“Yes,” Gabriel replied. 

They were interrupted when the door to the laboratory opened with a heavy metallic clang and the doctor and her assistants strolled inside. Gabriel let go of Jack and quickly stepped back from the table, trying his best to look like he wasn't caught doing something embarrassing. 

It turned out to be a worry for nothing because when Slovinska waltzed into the laboratory with her mute assistants in tow she was much too excited to pay any attention to anything going on around her. Now she was actually skipping, a strange sight for a woman of her age, as she carried a large, rectangle shaped crate in her arms. The crate resembled a large weapons' case, but if a crate that big fostered a gun large enough to require a case of that size Slovinska probably wouldn't have been able to skip with it in her hold. 

“It's done! Finally!” she announced to the ceiling as she strolled past Gabriel and to the side of her subject. She lowered the black crate carefully on the floor, undid the locks on it and picked something up, and when she straightened up again she was holding an arm. 

It looked sturdier than the other body parts she had hanging around her laboratory. It had a strong metal structure and shiny casing, and running within the structures and plates were thick, silicon-coated cables laced into a structure that resembled bare muscles. 

“Here! The final form,” Slovinska said with glee, holding the artificial limb like a newborn baby. “My best work yet,” she added, proud like a mother would. She wasn't addressing her words to anyone in the room as if everything that was alive in the room had become insignificant now that she had birthed this machine capable of doing the living better than them. 

With an excited puff of air and a bright smile she laid the arm carefully by Jack's side on the operating table and started to rearrange the cables already attached to him. It was like watching someone weave a basket or work the spinning wheel. She didn't even need any tools, just her hands as she pushed plates apart to reveal ports and hatches and started to push coils and wires and cables together and inside the new limb. It was a slow process that took a lot of adjusting, slow inching and tight fitting, but every last inch of cable welded into Jack's flesh eventually went inside the machine, and when they finally did Slovinska slipped the hatches and plates back in place. 

“There,” she sighed with contentment. “A perfect fit.” 

She marveled at her work for a while, hands on her hips and a smile on her face, and then started to conduct routine tests. She grasped the new arm by the wrist and elbow, lifted it up and bent it at each joint. She rolled the shoulder testing its limits and listening for a crank in the system. Satisfied, she lowered the arm back on the table and grasped the hand, stretching the fingers and bending them all at each joint, one at the time, a loving expression ghosting on her stern features.

“Wonderful,” she said. “Three more of these and the Regulator and we're all finished! We'll be off to field tests after a week, I suppose!” 

Gabriel felt a tingle down his spine. A week. After a week they'd be out of this stuffy laboratory and outside, back at work. The tingling turned into an excited buzz. Just a little longer and then they could both move out of this basement full of mock body parts and forget all about it. Field testing most likely meant low-priority missions to see that everything in Jack worked as intended, that his body took well to the prosthetics and the Regulator functioned correctly. The details of it didn't matter to Gabriel, as long as they'd be out of here and together again all would be fine.

Together. Simply thinking about the word felt like a shot of morphine in a tortured body. 

And torture had it been. The last six years of true separation and total silence ached like a rotten tooth, but the actual fall out had happened even before that. First it had been just a veil between them, a layer of secrecy and things they just couldn't do, no marriage nor a public change of relationship status for them as Overwatch needed their command united but strictly professional. Then the veil had grown into a curtain, secrets and things they couldn't and wouldn't speak to each other about piling up, and finally with distance, dissatisfaction and wasted time the curtain had turned into a wall, and by that time it was too late. 

Those cold, silent years and then the violent fall out with the dead silence that followed weren't a simple wound. They didn't hurt like bullets, knives or blaster fire did, they didn't tear at Gabriel's flesh like fire and hubris had. No, they were poison he had been tricked to drink, and slowly that poison had attacked what they had had and turned it into a black spot of festering remains of love, so real and painful that he could have sworn it was his actual heart that had withered. 

But _together_ , that would fix it and heal him. Gabriel felt a tug in his heart and an itch in his hands, a deep yearning to reach out and claim, to possess and keep. He wanted to wrap Jack back in his arms, sink his claws into his flesh and lock him in place. The ring under his clothes felt like a branding iron against his skin.

“Well, that's about it,” Slovinska concluded and pulled Gabriel out of the darkness of his mind. She was addressing her assistants when he turned to look around him. “We won't be putting him back into the tank today. I'll leave the arm there and check on it tomorrow. The ports reduce the risk of negative reaction from the body, but better safe than sorry. Hook some nutrients into the subject's system and cover him for the night.” 

The omnics listened to her instructions quietly and perfectly still, and when she fell silent they jerked into movement and started up on the tasks. With her hands in the pockets of her labcoat Slovinska watched them leave, and then she turned to Gabriel. 

“Thank you for your patience,” she said with a smile. 

Gabriel frowned. “I'm not in a hurry.” 

Slovinska shrugged. “No, and you're not in charge of this project either, but you are invested in it. I suppose people will always want their lost friends back,” she pondered out loud. “And that young Mexican lady with the funny hair who keeps snooping around apparently isn't much of a companion to you.” 

Sombra. Gabriel took a moment to sort his thoughts. He had almost forgotten about the woman and that they regularly worked together. Invested indeed. 

“She's a trouble-maker but nothing I can't handle,” Gabriel said. “If her snooping around bothers you, tell me. I'll deal with her.”

Slovinska waved the offer away. “Oh, no, she's no bother at all! I actually welcome her meddling, it's good beta-testing. After all, people with skills like hers are why I'm developing my tech in the first place! She is the virus, and I am the firewall between her and absolute chaos.” 

“Hm. Hopefully you're making progress.”

“Closed systems are the answer,” Slovinska said. “I've made huge strides here in Talon by working with omnics. I think she has tried to hack into my assistants, but after my alterations she can't access the entire system, not even their motor controls after I installed regulators into them. Now they will shut down and format the drives in case any unauthorized party tries to take over the system.” 

Gabriel made an acknowledging noise and nodded. He wondered what formatting their drives meant for omnics.

Slovinska was done for the day and bid him good night after shutting her computers and equipment down. Her assistants returned when she was arranging her things, one with an IV bag and one with a folded cotton sheet. One hooked the iv into a port in the stump of his arm, and the other threw the sheet over Jack, covering the man as well as the table he was laying on. 

Gabriel had forgotten about Jack as he was talking with Slovinska since he had laid so still and quiet he might as well have been unconscious or inside the tank, but as the sheet went over him Gabriel suddenly remembered he was very much awake and present. 

One of the omnics took the filled up waste pouches from the bucket and switched them with clean ones before leaving the laboratory after the doctor. In passing Gabriel wondered where they spent their idle hours. 

The laboratory was dark and quiet, save for the light and occasional churning from the tank that was kept on stand-by. The omnic had covered Jack completely, and now that they were alone again Gabriel took a hold of the corner of the sheet, pulling it over Jack's head and leaving it bundled up on his chest. 

“That was rude of them,” he noted with a hint of a smile. 

“Like I care,” Jack rasped. 

Gabriel studied his face closely. The rims of his eyes were still red even with the tear tracks dried, and he had settled on a deeply concentrated, unhappy scowl of an expression. 

“You do realize I will be like those omnics, right?” Jack suddenly said. 

Gabriel frowned. “No, you won't. They are omnics, and you are human. That's a different model they have of course. She told me herself, and it's not like you're stuck with omnic prosthetics either.” 

“I meant that I too will be mute and brainwashed without any chances of making my own choices,” Jack specified. 

“Humans can't be formatted or reprogrammed like machines can,” Gabriel said. “You'll be fine.”

“No, I will be _gone_!” Jack snarled. 

The word choice gave Gabriel a pause. It hurt like a rubber bullet to the chest even if it wasn't true. For a moment he scolded himself for being this vulnerable around the other. The losses of the past had left an opening in his armour. 

“Don't be so dramatic, Jack,” Gabriel scoffed, hopping to sit on the empty operating table next to Jack's. “It's alterations, not a lobotomy. Your body is under more construction than the insides of your head will. Probably the biggest way your brain will change is to rewire some nerves to adapt to the cybernetics.” 

Jack's breath came out in loud, frustrated puffs through his nose, and then he let out a desperate little laugh. “You really, really have missed me, huh. You'd cut off my limbs, take my eyes and scratch a part of my brain out to keep me here with you.” He laughed again, a thin noise from a breathless man.

His words sounded like accusations and they struck him as ones too, and Gabriel felt them prickling under his skin. “I didn't do that to you,” he pointed out with a low growl. “You did. You engaged a hostile target by yourself, and you got yourself injured and captured. You're reaping what you sowed, Jack.” 

Jack shook his head, very slowly and in a manner that made Gabriel uncertain if he was trying to deny his words or directing the gesture at himself and whatever he was thinking. 

“Gabe...” he started, a voice so level it was obviously fragile, “if you care about me... or if you ever did care, you won't let her put that thing into my head.” 

“And do you care?” Gabriel threw back at him and looked Jack's brow furrow in confusion.

“What?”

“Do you care _about me_ ,” Gabriel specified, his gaze nailed to Jack's face ready to vet any and all reactions showing on it. 

Jack licked his lips and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, taking in a slow intake of air. He looked like he was readying himself for an executioner. “You have my ring,” he grunted. 

“I do, yes,” Gabriel replied. This was just like Jack, to avoid the real subject even when he was confronted head on. Gabriel let his silence speak for itself; he wasn't content with the answer. 

On his place Jack huffed and turned his face away from the other. “Not enough to join Talon.” 

Another avoiding answer, and Gabriel felt his insides withering away at it. He scoffed. “Well, that's the only change that's going to happen after a week. You'll care enough to join us.”

A moment of silence transpired between them, and suddenly a burst of manic laughter ripped out of Jack, making Gabriel startle. Jack turned his face towards him, his blind eyes staring straight at him with a convulsive, lopsided grin stuck on his despairing face. “Is that what you think that chip of hers will do to me? Make me love you? Are you _insane_?” 

Everything about it, his laugh, his expression and his words felt like a slap in the face, and Gabriel recoiled back. He pulled his feet up to the table and crossed his arms, snarling at the man who couldn't see him. 

“Don't mock me,” Gabriel snapped. “Just learn to accept help when it's given to you! Where else in the word would you receive prosthetics this advanced and battle-ready if not here? Do you really think you'd be getting anything this good if it wasn't for me?!” 

Jack gave a hissing sigh and turned his eyes towards the ceiling again. He looked tired. “I probably would be nothing to them unless they wanted to make me a little gift for you. You sure have become an accomplished mercenary and a terrorist to get such good benefits.” 

Gabriel scoffed. He noticed the bite towards his alignment, but after the previous remarks they were nothing to be hurt over. “It's just tech, Jack. Many people have been enhanced and altered. That Shimada boy was altered even more than you. Angela has remade herself from the inside. _I_ have been remade. You'll just... be more like me. You'll be the same, only a bit altered.” 

Jack gave a dry, sad chuckle. “I’ll be the same… Like Amelie is the same, right?” 

Gabriel stilled, and the silence lasted a bit too long. Jack chuckled again. 

“That's not the same,” Gabriel argued. “It's not. She's... I don't know what she's been through, but it's not cyborgization. Nor does she have a chip like yours, she's different – “

“She remembers everything though,” Jack interrupted. “It's not like she's a stranger in Amelie's body. It's still her, she just doesn't feel the same.”

“She doesn't _feel at all_ ,” Gabriel corrected, “it's not the same. It's not the same process, it's not the same end-game, it's not the same!” His voice kept rising and becoming more insisting until he shouted the last bit. He didn't like how Jack kept twisting the facts and his words and insisting something that wasn't happening would, all because he was afraid. Gabriel couldn't wait for a week to pass so they could rid Jack of fear for good. 

They were quiet after that. The laboratory was eerie in the golden glow from the tank and the silhouettes of the human parts. The two sterile operating tables they were on could have been islands, so vast the gap between them felt. 

“God... You really still... You love me, don't you,” Jack muttered into the silence. His voice was grim and rough. He sounded slightly in awe, but in a way one would feel upon seeing the angel of death sitting at their bedside. 

The words felt like they punctured a hole into Gabriel, and he crumbled under the pain and heartblood fleeing his body. All his sleepless nights, his stress over his neglected duties and the time he had waited down here finally took their toll, and he let their weight press him down on the table. Quietly like a dying animal he lay on his side, face towards Jack and let the exhaustion wash over him. 

“Yes. Yes, I love you,” he mumbled, reaching out across the empty space between them and towards the mechanic arm under the sheet. He threw the sheet back to reveal the limb, pulled it by the forearm towards himself until it hung off the table and he could reach for the hand.

The limb was offline but it was still Jack's arm, and it was still Jack's hand that Gabriel laced his fingers with. He held on tightly as he felt himself drifting off to sleep. The hand was heavy and cold in his hold, like a dead man's.


	4. Chapter 4

Gabriel woke up with his back aching and feeling groggy, still holding Jack's hand. The operating table was merciless on him, the side he was lying on having lost all sensation from his hip and flank, and hoisting himself upwards again was a painful deed. He let go of Jack's hand as he sat up, disoriented for a moment as his mind struggled to wake up properly. 

It was impossible to tell the passage of time down in the basement, but since he and Jack were as they had been, nothing had changed in the laboratory around them, and he had the taste of wet paper in his mouth and the kind of nausea that came from too long naps swirling in his stomach, he gathered it must have been very early in the morning. 

Jack was asleep next to him on his own table, breathing deep. He must have been exhausted after everything, all the operations and the deadline set for his transformation. Gabriel wondered when was the last time Jack had gotten to sleep naturally and not be sedated. He wondered whether sleeping did feel any different now. Was it different from floating in that tank? Did it feel better? Were there such things as natural sleep and artificial sleep? 

Gabriel's thoughts started to drift in strange places, and so he wrenched himself up and off the table, shaking the confused mess out of his head. His feet were stiff and wobbly but he forced himself to walk out of the laboratory anyway, through the lobby, up with the elevator and back to the spaces with lower clearance level. He hid the clearance pass under his shirt where the ring was.

The clock in the main lobby showed it was a little over four in the morning, and the base was run on skeleton crew and with lowered power levels. Gabriel didn't even bother with his mask, offhandedly hoping the dim lights and his general reputation and bad looks were enough. Regularly no one aside from Sombra and sometimes Amelie saw his face, and of those Sombra had gotten used to him and Amelie wasn't capable of caring, but sometimes someone got to see him for the first time. His scars, his rising tide of decay, his black eyes and red irises – Gabriel wasn't a man people looked at very long. 

Jack wouldn't probably ever look at his face. The thought came to him out of the blue and he frowned at its absurdity. Jack could see with his visor on, and he would have it back after the process was completed, and as they were to be working together he would naturally, sooner of later, see his face. It was practically inevitable, and yet still the thought stayed. As if after the process was complete, it wouldn't be the same. 

He shook his head and headed to the kitchen. 

Gabriel hadn't been hungry in weeks but had eaten on a regular schedule anyway. Today he had made an exception by staying in the lab so long and falling asleep there, and now his stomach was painfully protesting. He had missed both lunch and dinner, and the mess hall was closed for nights with a grating gate and a lock, but Gabriel took some liberties with the protocol here and there anyway, so he simply wraithed through the gate and into the kitchen. 

Four in the morning was a bad hour to be up. His head was somehow confused with sleep and perfectly clear at the same time, and he couldn't stop thinking about today, the operation, the deadline or Jack's cold hand in his. He angrily stuffed his mouth with white bread while loading six yogurt cups and three apples in the crook of his arm. It was ridiculous to dwell in the details; what was done was done and what was to come would come in time, it was out of his control all the same. He snatched a package of cold cuts on top of the fruit and the yogurts, grabbed some more bread and slipped out of the kitchen. 

He made his way to his quarters even though he somehow he knew he wouldn't be able to get more sleep tonight.

From that on his breakfast was all coffee and he stubbornly refused to visit the lab as usual, angry at himself about the incident in the laboratory even though he wasn't sure which part. Instead he poured himself as much coffee as there fit in the biggest mug he managed to find and forced himself to get back to work – his actual work – and so he found himself again in front of a computer trying to get somewhere with the mission plan.

“You look awful,” Sombra commented, snacking on chips and spinning on her stool. “Like you literally crawled out of a coffin just minutes ago. And from under ground. After a month there.” 

“Fuck off,” Gabriel answered without lifting his gaze from the computer screen he couldn't even focus on. 

He heard Sombra shrug. “I'm just saying, I've never seen you look this terrible, not even when you actually look like a corpse. You look like a different sort of a corpse now. A miserable one. But hey, suit yourself, I don't care.” 

The crunching noise from her snacks continued after that, an infuriating noise that pushed its way into Gabriel's ear canal and rubbed on his brain like sandpaper. He tried to focus, but to be honest he didn't even know what he was looking at on the screen anymore and ended up screwing his eyes shut and pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. 

“It's about Soldier, isn't it?” Sombra said after a while, apparently incapable of dropping the subject.

Gabriel spat in irritation. “Oh no, it's about the lack of pudding on our dessert menu. Of course it's about him, what else?!” 

Sombra bit on a chip. “Wow, you're snappy.” 

Gabriel turned around on his seat to glare at her, but even he knew he probably looked more like a disgruntled basset hound than a man making any kind of a threat. Sombra was regarding him with an almost serious expression despite her languid position, a bag of chips in her lap and her head tilted. It was an unusual look on her, and something about it made a knot come loose in Gabriel's chest. 

“I haven't been down there for four days now,” Gabriel muttered, turning his back to her again and leaning against the table. “I got an update e-mail though. His new limbs are taking well.” 

Sombra munched on another chip. “And that's... bad?” 

Gabriel combed his hand through his hair, ruffling the overgrown crop and digging his nails into his scalp. “I don't know,” he said, eventually. “He looks whole again, but... somehow... Hmm.” 

“You would have liked him to stay without limbs, then?”

“Yes,” Gabriel answered, then hesitated. “No. That's not it. It's... He's changing.” 

“But you already knew that,” Sombra pointed out with her mouth full.

“I knew. And it should be fine,” Gabriel argued, pinching the bridge of his nose briefly before moving to pick at an old scar cutting across his face. “He'll remember me just as it was. He won't lose a damn thing about anything, all the parts will be there. But...” 

Sombra set her snacks aside and shuffled into a better position on her chair. The familiar jingling sound of her keypad rang in the room, but Gabriel didn't turn to look what she was doing. She might have just been browsing, with her attention span it wouldn't be odd that this conversation was boring her. “You used to be buddies, right,” Sombra said. “I come across a lot of pictures with you together professionally. Also records of you serving together. Same unit, close ranks. Oh, you used to be his boss too! Heh.” 

“Yeah. I want him to remember all of that,” Gabriel said. He didn't need to turn to see what she was browsing through, and somehow he actively didn't want to see any of it. Any picture of Jack and him from the past would feel like a stab in the gut now. “We used to be... lots of things. He can't be allowed to forget that.”

“Then everything should be fine since he won't,” Sombra said. “You'll have your tragic story of brothers in arms ending up in opposing sides and he'll be in on the joke! What's eating you about this?” 

That was the question, wasn't it? Gabriel couldn't tell. He could feel his stomach turning with unease, he could feel the inevitable weighing heavy on his mind, he could feel his ability to focus vanishing as his thoughts kept mulling over this, but he couldn't really point out why. 

“You're right,” he said. “He'll remember it all, he'll remember us and all that happened. He'll just have new limbs and he won't be angry with me anymore. It should be fine, and yet...” 

Sombra cleared her throat and hummed thoughtfully. “Don't you want it, is that it? You wanted you two to fight until the bitter end and kill each other?” 

“Well... Yes. And no,” Gabriel replied. The words were leaking out of him without a filter, like he was thinking out loud and Sombra was simply a point to bounce off of. He spun around on his chair too, not to face Sombra but to lean against the table and stretch out his legs. He let his head tip back and his gaze fix onto a point in the ceiling. 

Gabriel sighed, slumping on his seat. “He used to love me.” 

Sombra didn't say anything, but she had stilled on her place. 

“He loved me so much he let me become this. And I loved him back,” Gabriel said, almost confessed. He hadn't uttered any of these truths to a living soul in years, and they rolled off his tongue like they were golden prayers, valuable and heavy and meant for few. “I still love him.”

Silence stretched on for a long time. Eventually Sombra broke it with a quiet clearing of her throat.

“Oh. Oh, wow,” she muttered, giving off an awkward vibe, something very unusual for her. “That's... Yeah.”

Gabriel let his head tilt to the side so he could eye the woman across from him with one eye. She looked somewhat tense and was trying to cover up how uncomfortable she was.   
He gave a silent chuckle at that: He had managed to keep this from the world, and apparently that included Sombra, _Sombra_ of all people. He was somewhat pleased, having for once won this game of secrets and conspiracies, and he took a moment to enjoy how Sombra was clearly collecting herself and re-evaluating the situation. She had ended up way closer to this and on much thinner ice than she had anticipated, and the whole ordeal clearly disturbed her. 

It must have been disturbing, Gabriel realized suddenly in a moment of clarity, what had come of their love. Of him. Of them both. He felt a tug in his heart, something possessive about the power and uniqueness they represented, along with a flicker of dark joy that came with revealing them to someone. 

“I made him cry here just recently, you know, just by touching him gently. Do you have any idea what that feels like?” he asked Sombra.

“No, I don't,” she replied quietly. Her tone was almost meek as she was wandering about in this uncharted territory made entirely of eggshells. 

“No, I suppose you don't,” he sighed. “Then you don't know what the most painful thing in the world is either.”

“What's that?” Sombra asked. 

“Loving someone this much and it not being enough,” Gabriel said. The words were so bitter in his mouth he felt his face twitching and throat burning. “And losing him because everything is against you.”

Sombra didn't say anything. 

Gabriel closed his eyes and turned his face back towards the ceiling again. His heartbeat was painful, and each word felt like a barb on his tongue as he spoke towards high heavens. “I want to keep him so bad. I want to keep him and never let him go. I want to die with him.” 

Silences between his confessions were so total he could hear Sombra swallowing. 

“But... I want him to feel that way about me too. I want him to... To... I want to keep those feelings too. I want his love and whatever became of it. I want him to stay with me and hate what I became, because he loved me once. Because he did. He did love me, once.” He let out a heavy sigh that dragged on as if it wasn't only air but something dark that had built up in his system over past weeks. It was all becoming very clear for him now, and with that clarity came the bleak, heavy sorrow that he was very familiar with. 

“I'm going to lose him, aren't I? Whatever I do or don't do, he'll be gone in a few days.” Gabriel had barely muttered the words when his throat seemed to close and rob him of his breath. His voice thinned and broke.

He had options of course. He could change the course of the events about to unfold, and he was a very skilled tactician so he was sure to make the most of them, but no matter how much he thought and reviewed the situation at hand, all his options were bad. 

He could stand back and let doctor Slovinska finish her work, install the Regulator and boot the system, and Gabriel would have a new version of Jack in his hands before the week was over. A Jack who remembered everything that had happened, everything they had been, done and what they were now, but who had changed his feelings about them. A picture of Amelie flashed in Gabriel's mind despite his best efforts. 

He could refuse the whole deal and turn the benefit offer down, but Jack's cyborgization would be completed anyway, and he wouldn't have any version of Jack. Jack would be employed anyway. 

He could take the offer but insist on halting the cyborgization. Maybe Jack could stay as a test subject down there, maybe he didn't have to walk or see ever again. Gabriel could still stay at the base and see him often. But as a test subject Jack would probably be returned to the tank for most of the time, and behind that glass surrounded by bubbles and golden glow he would be even further gone. Not to mention, the thought of leaving Jack permanently mutilated and just let Slovinska cut him whenever she pleased, to break him down into parts and put him back together again shot a cold streak in his gut. 

He could kill Jack. 

No one would know to stop him. He could just walk down there right now and finish this all for them both. Maybe it would be merciful. It would certainly be kinder than dooming him into being a test subject for the rest of his days and just caress his face when he was opened up again and again. 

Many options, all of then bad. Gabriel felt slightly nauseated by them. _What have they done to him_ had been his first thought when he saw him here in the tank, and _what will_ I _do to him_ seemed to be the continuation. Why had it come to this? 

And then suddenly, he knew why. He snapped back to attention and spun towards Sombra, who was startled by his sudden movement and jumped on her seat.

“You,” Gabriel growled at her. “You got me into this.”

There was a rare expression on Sombra's face. All the usual confidence and traces of a smirk were gone, leaving behind a very serious and worried look with a hint of fear in it as she looked back at him. She wasn't usually afraid of Gabriel, even teased him on regular basis, but whatever she read in him that kept her safe had now vanished, and for the first time in a long while she looked like she was assessing a real threat. 

Gabriel snarled at her. “It was you. You showed him to me! You told me he was here, and you made it seem like some sort of a joke!” He was fuming, and it felt good. It felt good to finally get angry at something, and he stood up from his seat. “You have been snooping around my files as well. Did you track him for them? Did you hint at his whereabouts to someone here? Did you get him captured?” 

Determination settled over Sombra's momentary shock, and she refused to get up. She stayed put, her hands gripping the edges of her chair. “I didn't tell them anything, and I had nothing to do with this thing here,” she said calmly. 

Gabriel stared at her and tried to see through her act and her lies. If there would be any, he'd catch them. “You always stick your nose into other people's business and you love to trade secrets. Everything would make perfect sense if you had a hand in this,” he said. 

“And yet, I didn't,” Sombra answered. “I'm a freelancer agent, like you. I have my own goals, and tracking down every single target Talon and my fellow agents are after is not my idea of a useful pastime.” 

“It was you who knew of this, and you who pushed me in the middle of it. Could have been a joke, could have been on orders,” Gabriel countered. The web of possibilities spread out before him and he traced all the threads carefully, weighing the probabilities and stakes while trying to ignore how he had fallen in the middle of that web and was now stuck in it. 

“I knew of it because people like Slovinska try to counter my hacking, and my hacking evolves when I counter them,” Sombra said. “I came across your favorite nemesis by accident and thought you should be a part of that project. If I hadn't done that, you wouldn't have known until it was completed! You should thank me.” 

Gabriel snarled at her and started to approach. “Thank you? Is that you want me to do? Thank you for getting mixed into my _private_ matters? For messing with me and taunting me with something this valuable?” 

He was close to her now, his steps slow yet certain and his form threatening to come undone, and when he didn't stop at a regular talking distance, Sombra finally sprang up from the chair and onto her feet. 

“I meant that it was lucky for you that I gave you a hint this early,” Sombra explained smoothly while putting some distance between them. “You clearly want to make your own choices about this, and now you can.”

“There will be no thanks given to anyone involved in this damn experiment series,” Gabriel hissed at her, following her around, refusing to let her back away. “Nothing good will come out of this. Not to anyone! And you... You took part in stirring up this mess. You are as responsible for it as Slovinska is, as the entire science department is, as everyone who thought up the whole capture and who cut off his limbs and put him in that tank!” 

Sombra took a few strides backwards with her hands raised either in a calming gesture or getting ready for a fight. “Sure, sure, but let's think about the out-come! It's still only about to happen, and before it does, it would be very bad to kill other agents, don't you think?”

“I'm not about to kill anyone just yet,” Gabriel spat at her.

Sombra nodded, but lifted her hands up even more. “Okay, good, that's good.”

“Oh you're not off the hook yet,” Gabriel said, glaring at her. 

Sombra eyed him carefully, reassessing the situation. It was clear she wasn't happy about any of it, but her caution started to turn back into her usual lazy confidence and she crossed her arms across her chest. 

 

It was two more days until Gabriel finally gave in and headed back down to the laboratory, this time fully dressed in Reaper's clothes in hopes of being stronger like that. It was past midnight, and the descent down felt overtly long, the elevator stuffy and too narrow, and he counted the fractions of seconds his clearance pass took to open the doors. Every corridor and every turn felt odd like this was the first time he was making his way thorough them, and maybe it was truly the first time he really thought about the way as he walked. 

He dreaded his destination, and the last door came after a long way and all too soon at the same time. Gabriel stood in front of it, took a deep breath, held it in and counted to ten before entering. 

Somehow he had feared that the laboratory would have changed during the time he had avoided it, but as one could rationally expect he found it almost exactly as it had been. The only real change was the lighting: the tank had been drained and turned off, and instead of its yellowish glowing light the room was lit with a row of fluorescent lamps in the ceiling, shining bright in the back of the laboratory and casting dark shadows in the front. 

Jack was no longer in the tank but on the very same table he had laid the last time Gabriel visited, only there was much more equipment around the table and a network of cables and cords connecting them all to the subject in the middle. There surrounded by large machines, in the shadow of laser cutters, soldering tools, temperature controls, power stations and their messy wires and adapters and stacks of computer drives, was a man. 

Gabriel had to circle around a bit and step over heavy coils to get near the table, and by the time he had found his path there Jack was already aware of him and had his face turned towards him.

Jack was complete now. He had new limbs with armour plates painted black, and peeking underneath those a muscle-like braid of red cables. He had been dressed in a basic field uniform with black and gray camouflage-print trousers and he had a fresh layer of thin armouring covering his upper body. His face had been recently shaved and his hair cut again so close to the scalp that all that was left was silver stubble.

With all the plastic tubes and needles gone and with four limbs attached, Jack somehow looked even more helpless than he had been before. Every one of his new limbs had a series of heavy cords hooked into their maintenance ports and into external power sources, and the limbs themselves were offline. Cold and dark they lay there like parts of a doll, weighing him down on the table so hard he wasn't even strapped on it. 

“Hello, Jack,” Gabriel greeted him softly. “Still here, I see.”

At first it seemed like he planned to ignore Gabriel, just slowly blinking and keeping his face neutral, but eventually he noted: “Not for long anymore.”

Gabriel set his hand on the edge of the table next to Jack's new arm. “She told me you're finished. You look like it too.” 

Jack huffed an annoyed little sound but didn't bother with a comment. 

“All the testing is done and the settings are ready to go,” Gabriel continued unbothered, glancing Jack over. “You have the regular set of parts again.” 

“And I'm about to get one extra too,” Jack gravely noted. 

Gabriel ignored his comment, instead lifting his hand from the table and covering Jack's wrist with it. “Tell me how does it feel.” 

A hint of frown appeared on Jack's face. “What does what feel?” 

“Being whole again,” Gabriel specified. “Having been made anew. Are you you again or have you turned into something else?” 

Now Jack turned his face towards Gabriel if only to show his confusion over the question. Gabriel stared back into his cloudy eyes and hoped the other could see him and read the rest from his gaze. He didn't know what Jack sensed like this, but he had a hard time believing it was anything useful. 

“Do you really want to know what I feel like?” Jack asked. His voice was thin and frighteningly calm. “Do you _really_ want to know?”

Gabriel ran his hand up Jack's arm, feeling the hard plating and the firm silicon coils underneath, all still and cold. “Yes. I really want to know.” 

Jack made a low noise in the back of his throat and flashed him a side of teeth. “I don't feel any more or less whole or new or whatever you said,” he said. “I feel violated, that's all. I have been canned like a frog, chopped to pieces and then put together again like an engine or a gun. I've gotten used to not having eyes, but now I don't have arms or legs either, and tomorrow you'll put a chip in my head and I don't even know who's the man who will wake up after that.” 

“You do have arms and legs,” Gabriel noted quietly, his hands petting the metal curve of his bicep. 

“Just hooking cyborg parts onto me doesn't mean those limbs are mine,” Jack said, turning away. “Just like me having my visor doesn't make me less blind.” 

“Jack,” Gabriel said. He didn't know why, he just did, like he was calling out to the other. 

Jack didn't respond or ask, just turned his face towards him again. 

“You're still you,” Gabriel reminded him quietly and moved his had from the metal arm towards the other man's face, gently brushing his knuckles against his cheek. Stubble scratched his skin, but after the cold metal, plastic and silicon Jack's skin was the softest, warmest thing to touch. Jack didn't flinch away from him, and a smile twitched in the corner of Gabriel's mouth. 

“For now,” Jack rasped, tired and grim like a dying man. “Maybe I won't wake up tomorrow. Maybe my consciousness will fade and turn into something else. But you'll be happy, right? At least I'll remember everything.” He sounded bitter and there was a scowl to accompany the tone. 

“Yes. You'll remember,” Gabriel muttered in reply, his knuckles still resting against the other man's cheek. He distantly wondered whether it was even possible to properly shave his beard. He didn't remember Jack's cheeks ever feeling smooth. 

Whatever answer Jack had tried to get from him, that wasn't it. His scowl became deeper and he pressed his mouth into a tight white line. “You'll be the first one to know I'm not the same. I hope you know that,” he bitterly muttered. “The memories will be there, but I won't think anything about them. The other way around would be better for you, you know. I could forget about everything but at least I'd still continue to be me.” 

“You wouldn't know me anymore though,” Gabriel pointed out. “Everything we had and what we are would stop mattering, like it never happened.”

“It will still have happened in any case,” Jack said with a scoff and an impatient twitch in his brows. He might have meant to roll his eyes, but it wasn't clear. “Wouldn't it be better if I just forgot about us instead of me telling you it doesn't matter anymore?” 

Gabriel let out a long sigh. The release of breath felt endless even though he hadn't held it, and it didn't ease the feeling dwelling inside him either. “And does it matter now?” 

The scowl turned into an almost resentful frown and Jack was quiet for a long while, his teeth sinking into his lower lip. He turned his face towards the ceiling again and rapidly blinked his eyes. “Well, it happened, didn't it? It all happened. Our lives, your betrayal, the fall,” he grunted towards the ceiling. “How could it not matter? And I hate you a bit more after my time in here, you know? You'll let them destroy me and not even properly kill me.” 

“I don't want you to die,” Gabriel answered. “Didn't I tell you before? I want to keep you.” 

A small shudder shook Jack and he fell silent again. He couldn't move much with the dead cyborg parts weighing him down, but he still managed to turn his face away from Gabriel, who took the hint and retracted his hand from his face. It was a small rejection, the tiniest disconnect, but it was all the power Jack had and he used it. It hurt more than a little gesture like it should have. 

Gabriel sighed and looked at the net of cables Jack was bundled in, connecting him to the computer units and external power sources around him. He looked like he was laying in the middle of a spider's net like this, and despite his stature and dangerous strength he looked very vulnerable there. Gabriel took a long, evaluating look at the cables and the machines they were connected to, all on stand by, then he gazed around the empty laboratory and looked for the surveillance cameras before turning back to Jack. The cords and cables took up way too much space, and with his path cleared he started to unhook them. They came off very easily, each one requiring only a twist to unlock and then they slipped out of the ports with a hiss or a click, each one falling from the table to the floor. One by one he undid all the cables until Jack wasn't connected to anything anymore and the table was clear. The entire time Jack didn't say anything, just inched his head into better positions to listen a bit more keenly to his movements. 

With the table cleared and the cords out of the way Gabriel could move about more freely. He circled the table, peering down at Jack and brushed his hand against each of his new limbs as he went by until he ended up on the other side of the table. The silence stretched on, either out of confusion or curiosity, and without another word Gabriel started to put his things on the operating table next to them. There he placed his clearance pass, his mask, a bundled up shirt with metal hidden inside he had brought down hidden underneath his coat, a burner phone, and even the ring from around his neck. Lastly he undid the straps of his long leather coat, shook it off his shoulders and threw it there on the table as well. 

He turned, stepped closer to the table Jack was laying on and pulled himself up to sit on the edge. He saw Jack tensing up when he sat next to him and heard him take in a sharp breath. 

“I don't want to lose you, Jackie,” Gabriel whispered to the other. He leaned over the man to breathe the words close to his face, pulling himself further on the table. He sat still for a moment waiting for a come-back, but Jack remained very still and quiet. Gabriel sighed and let tension escape his body. He let himself slowly sink down over the other man until his cheek pressed against his collar and he could curl up on his chest. 

Jack was warm. He was warm, he was firm and he was real, and despite the metal and plastic and having soaked in chemicals for months he still smelled like himself when Gabriel turned his face against his neck and inhaled. He was here and he was human, and Gabriel felt himself growing weak there on top of him. He felt his cheeks flushing and his hands shaking, he felt his entire body trembling like a small bird, soaking up Jack's warmth after being isolated and freezing for so long. He wanted nothing more than to stay there, curl himself over and around the other and just stay there until they both died, never to be separated again. He wanted this to be eternal. 

“Gabe...” Jack said but didn't seem to know how to continue. His voice was rough and thin, and Gabriel thought he recognized a sad note in it. 

“It's okay. Just a moment,” Gabriel muttered against the armouring on his chest. Unlike the offline limbs, these plates were warm as the living being inside the shell radiated heat, and when Gabriel pressed his ear there he heard the deep thumping of Jack's heart. “Just another moment.”

Jack hummed something deep in his chest, never quite turning the noise into words, and Gabriel felt the sound inside him, felt the small shift the other man managed under him. Gabriel pressed his left hand flat against Jack's chest and let the other slip to his side, getting as close to an embrace as was possible in the awkward position and limited space, but just the thought of wrapping his arms around him made that deep cavity in his gut churning with possessive longing settle down and purr with satisfaction. 

Whatever deep pits their time apart and the time spent raging against each other had carved inside Gabriel were filled, and for once the ache halted. He let his eyes slip shut.

“I don't care if you hate me for the rest of your life,” Gabriel said, tightening his hold. “ Go ahead. Hate me. Blame me. Hunt me down and kill me. As long as no one takes away our past, it'll be fine. You loved me once, and nothing changes that.” 

Jack swallowed as he listened to his confession, but whatever he was thinking or feeling he wasn't tense anymore. He took a deep inhale of breath, and Gabriel felt his chest rising and then falling with it. 

“Gabe...” Jack muttered. “I can't hold you like this.”

Gabriel hummed. “I know. I don't think you would, if you could.” 

Jack managed a shrug and a restless shift. “Maybe so. I don't think I love you enough to let you kill me.” 

The words cut Gabriel like a knife straight to the heart, and he curled up inn himself more. He played the words over in his head again, sealing them into his memory and wondered if the memory would be sweet or painful to return to later. As much as he wished for eternity, he felt time ticking by and their moment slipping through his fingers like sand. 

“You know... If I could pick one thing you'd do for me, it wouldn't be holding me,” Gabriel said. “I'd have you look at my face.” 

Jack made a dry, humourless sound and Gabriel imagined him rolling his eyes. “I suppose I'll do that as much as you'd like to soon enough. I can hardly go on field duty without my seeing aids.”

His tone was cold and once again they were back on discussing the inevitable. The moment ended and suddenly they were back on death row, and Gabriel forced himself to pull away from Jack's warmth and sit up again. He took one last look at him like this, saved the memory with utmost care and moved on. 

“Jack. I need you to listen to me very carefully now,” he said. “You'll have to remember everything I say. Do you understand?” 

Jack blinked a few times, a frown on his face as he visibly struggled to catch up with the sudden shift in atmosphere. Finally he replied: “I understand.” 

Gabriel paused to let the words sink in better, prepared himself and then started to recite his piece: “This laboratory is on the fourth subsurface level of this base. The base we are currently in is Axiom's research facility, and it is manned by both military and science personnel. It is located in an industrial district, and even though the premises are guarded this is still a covert base on civilian territory. Compromise the covered status, and evacuating and covering the track will become our first priority. Are you with me?” 

Jack's frown had only grown deeper, bu he nodded as soon as Gabriel asked. 

He went on: “Good. This is the fourth level underground. To get to the surface you'll have to take the door to the corridor, turn left and go on until you reach an elevator lobby. Elevator asks for a clearance, and then it will take you up to level zero. From there you will take stairs up, go through a glass door asking for the same clearance as the elevator, and then you will be in the main lobby of the building. Get outside, and go for the main gate. Remember the directions and don't stop, and you'll be outside in three minutes and forty seconds. Did you get it all?”

“Yes,” Jack answered. His voice was blank and alert, though he was clearly on his guard and rapidly assessing the situation. 

Gabriel pushed himself off the table and reached for the stuff he had brought. He took his clearance pass, rattled it on its chain and pressed the card briefly against Jack's cheek. “This is the clearance you'll need. I'll put it around your neck.” He did so quickly, then picked up the rest of the stuff. He put on his coat, picked up the phone and the ring both, weighing them on his palm. He hesitated for a moment, but finally leaned over Jack again and put the necklace over his head as well.

“You'll get this back. I gave it to you in the first place anyway,” he said, and without waiting for any reaction from the other turned to the burner phone, tapped the key code to it and sent the prepared text. 

He counted two seconds, five seconds, and then finally on the eighth the bundle he had brought with him came to life, flashed purple and there on the table materialized Sombra, looking disgruntled but prepared with a messenger bag resting on her hip and her systems glowing bright pink. “Buenas noches,” she greeted. “Are we ready?”

“Almost,” Gabriel replied, extending his arm to receive Sombra's bag that she happily tossed to him as she hopped down from the table. As she turned to the computer units and started tapping away, Gabriel turned back to Jack, leaning over the table and over his head. 

“Straight to the main gate, you hear me?” he said.

“I'll never make it out,” Jack countered. 

“Yes, you will,” Gabriel hastily said, tapped on the phone once more and sent another text. This time it took only three seconds for the reply to arrive, and Gabriel locked the phone and opened the bag instead. “We have company. She's in position and ready. Probably with backup too, not that she'd tell me.”

“Who?” Jack asked even though judging by the tensing in his voice he already knew.

“Ana,” Gabriel replied. 

There wasn't time or proper words, so Jack didn't answer. His frown turned into determination and alertness, and he seemed to have finally caught up with the idea.

“I'm ready to boot him up,” Sombra reported to them. 

“Go ahead,” Gabriel said. 

Sombra stepped closer to Jack and whisked her holographic keyboard to existence. Her equipment formed a connection to the cyborg parts as easy as breathing, and it took only a very simple command sequence from her for Jack's limbs to power up and start to glow. The systems hummed lowly as they cycled up and small traces of light started to glow in the seams of the plates, first red but soon brightening to orange as the systems gained cycles and came properly online. 

When the reboot was complete, the humming noise quieted down and was replaced with the faint whisper of cooling systems, and then suddenly the vibrating connection Sombra had to them snapped and disappeared, making Sombra jump as her system reeled back. 

“Oh, okay, that was the... yeah, it's self-sustaining now,” Sombra muttered under her breath while sorting through her data. “She's good...” 

Gabriel wasn't interested in the details of computer science and whatever the rivalry between the two women was, his attention was fixed on Jack who had started to move. First it was just his fingers twitching, but soon he could make his feet flinch and his legs kick, he managed to roll his shoulder joint and toss his arms into new position, and when his new body parts rejected Sombra he managed to scramble his hands into work and push himself up on the table. There was a pained expression on his face and he was gritting his teeth, but he pushed on regardless, swung his legs off the table and carefully lowered his weight on his new feet. 

Gabriel took an instinctive step back as Jack straightened up. He was mobile now, which suddenly turned him from harmless to dangerous, an enemy at large.

He looked a bit uncertain at first, shuffling his feet on the ground and finding his balance, testing the weight and movements of his new limbs very carefully like they were sensitive or could break without a warning, but the urgency of the situation at hand forced him through his tests fast. His right hand remained on the table while the left one felt around himself in a wide arc.

“I have your visor,” Gabriel said, pulling the mask out of the messenger bag and approached Jack with it in his hand. “The last piece,” he added under his breath. When it would be added Jack would be wholly on his own again, fully equipped and ready to dash out and fight. Gabriel was very much aware that by handing the visor over he would finish off the last remains of the forced bond they had had in this laboratory. 

He meant to just hand it over to Jack, but when he extended his hand towards the other, Jack grasped a hold of his wrist and yanked him closer. Jack's face was no longer passive or guarded, but fierce and looking ready for a fight, and he looked startlingly lot like his old self with his openly defiant expression. 

“Put it on me,” he said to Gabriel like he was giving a command, and Gabriel found himself obeying. The mask had several parts but it was simple enough to figure out, and soon its parts slid in place, locks securing themselves and the system booted itself up automatically once the parts were in place. The dark visor lit up, the red light flickering on and the HUD loading itself, and Jack's murky eyes disappeared behind the screen and red light.

Jack kept his hold tight on Gabriel's wrist, his new hand already almost as warm as a biological body. Its hold was harder but not any more tighter than Jack had managed with his own hand when he had wanted to draw a moment before a good-bye on just a little longer.

“One more thing before I go, Gabe. I will look at you,” he said – threatened. Promised.

Gabriel felt his breath catching in his throat, his heart hammering against his sternum and his body shaking.

Jack was looking at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so comes the end for these star-crossed lovers. For now, at least. 
> 
> I loved the science-babble side of this fic and all the cyborg stuff.   
> Fun fact: Slovinska is named after a literary theorist whose work I was struggling with by the time I started writing this last October. 
> 
> Kudos and comments are always welcome on my work! Comments especially keep a writer going. I'm interested to know what you thought and felt about this work.   
> A big thank you to those who checked out the reaper76bigbang blog on tumblr and reblogged our promo post.
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](http://zombieheroine.tumblr.com/) and come yell at me about stuff.


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